SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Lynch, David
(1946-2025) US actor, artist and musician and primarily filmmaker whose work extended Surrealism into mainstream Cinema and Television. Lynch's films tend to examine the uneasy truce between rationality and the unconscious mind by revealing how intimations of Sex, Identity and death make themselves felt in modern American communities. The term Lynchian was defined by David Foster ...
Universe
US Original-Anthology series edited by Terry Carr for the first seventeen volumes (1971-1987) and renewed by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber for three volumes (1990-1994). This was arguably the best (and longest-lasting) of all original-anthology series in the field. Universe 1 (anth 1971) appeared while Carr was still an editor for its ...
Fantastic Story Quarterly
US reprint Pulp magazine, 23 issues Spring 1950 to Spring 1955, the title changing after Spring 1951 to Fantastic Story Magazine; published by Best Books, a subsidiary of Standard Magazines. Sam Merwin Jr was editor until Fall 1951, being succeeded by Samuel Mines and then by Alexander Samalman for the last two issues. / Most of the reprints were from ...
Alexander, Alma
Pseudonym of Yugoslavian-born author Alma Alexander Hromic Deckert (1963- ), whose childhood was spent in Africa, her early adulthood in New Zealand, and who is currently in USA; active as an author of nonfantastic work from around 1995, and since that date mostly as an author of fantasy. Her first sequences, including the Changer of Days series, beginning with Changer of Days, Volume One (2001; vt The Hidden Queen 2005), and the ...
Copeland, Leland S
(1886-1973) US amateur astronomer and poet, a longtime contributor to Sky and Telescope magazine who is sometimes noted for his minor contributions to the field of astronomy. He merits a modicum of attention as the first poet (see Poetry) to have his works appear in an SF Magazine, as editor Hugo Gernsback published nineteen of his poems in Amazing Stories and ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...