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
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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 ...
Gordon, Joan
(1947- ) US editor and academic, currently a professor of English at Nassau Community College in New York, whose writing career began with Joe Haldeman (1980 chap), a serviceable introductory study of the work of Joe Haldeman. Her next book, Gene Wolfe (1986), comprises an early attempt to present the work – up to and including The Book of the New Sun – of perhaps the most difficult of all sf ...
Æon Speculative Fiction
US downloadable Online Magazine which began as a Semiprozine but paid professional word rates for its last two issues. It was published and edited by mother and daughter Bridget and Marti McKenna, initially through Scorpius Digital in Seattle, Washington and, from issue #7 by Quintamid, Seattle. It ran for 14 quarterly issues (missing only February 2007) from November 2004 to May 2008. The unpublished fifteenth issue and other ...
Slant
UK Fanzine (1948-1953) edited from Belfast by Walt Willis. Seven issues, December 1948 to Winter 1952. / Neatly hand-printed on a small letterpress machine, and containing lino-cut illustrations by James White and Bob Shaw, Slant is best remembered for introducing the Irish Fandom of that era – principally Willis, Shaw and White ...
Bettersworth, Alexander Pitts
(1830-1903) US author whose anonymous The Strange Ms by _______ MD (1883) presents a manuscript, seemingly composed in 1881, which predicts a worldwide Disaster in a very Near Future 1884, when a Comet strikes the earth, creating vast fire storms, shifting the world's axis, melting the polar ice, eliminating almost all humans. A few survivors trek north to Canada, where they hope to mate 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 ...