SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 17 January 2025
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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 ...
Fighting Fantasy
Gamebook series (from 1982). Puffin, Wizard Books. Designed by Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone. / The idea of single-player Role Playing Game scenarios was first used in a number of adventures for the early fantasy game Tunnels and Trolls (1975 Flying Buffalo [FB]) designed by Ken St Andre, beginning with Buffalo Castle (1976 ...
Renard, Joseph
(1938-1997) US playwright and author whose sf has been restricted to The Monodyne Catastrophe (August 1970 Venture as "How We Won the Monodyne"; much exp 1977), in which Native Americans attempt to take over the eponymous Power Source. [JC]
Bayley, Barrington J
(1937-2008) UK author, active as a freelance under various names in the first decades of his career, author of juvenile stories, picture-strips and features as well as sf, which he began to publish with "Combat's End" for Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine #4 in 1954, where his name was given as J Barrington Bayley. His sf pseudonyms included P F Woods (at least ten stories), Alan Aumbry (one story), John Diamond (one story), and ...
Fried, Seth
(? - ) US journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre" (31 August 2009 One Story), but much of whose short fiction is nonfantastic, though "Manhattan in 11031 AD" (11 June 2015 The New Yorker) is a deft Ruins-And-Futurity exercise. He is primarily of sf interest for his first novel, The Municipalists (2019), an ...
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 ...