SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 24 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 ...
Bramwell, James
(1911-1995) UK playwright, teacher and author, who also wrote as by James Byrom; his Utopia, Going West (1935), is set on a Mediterranean Island newly created by a deity disgruntled with humanity's record and prospects; the story, uneasily Equipoised between genres, ends in disaster, and the Brave New World – William Shakespeare's The Tempest ...
De Veer, Willem
(1865-1932) Dutch author, doctor of law (University of Amsterdam) and colonial judge for the Dutch East India Company, latterly living in the UK. No Dutch version of his An Emperor in the Dock (1915), which is an Alternate History of World War One, has been found. [JC]
Seidenberg, Roderick
(1889-1973) German-born architect and author, in USA from 1910 or earlier; imprisoned 1918-1920 as a World War One conscientious objector. In the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he also contributed essays to various journals. His first book, Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (1950), incisively if adamantly argues that human history in the large scale is essentially predetermined, and can be graphed as a three-part sequence: ...
Keppel-Jones, Arthur
(1909-1996) South African-born historian and author, in Canada from 1959, whose When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa from 1952 to 2010: First Published in 2015 (1947) takes a gloomy view of the future of that country, analysing the mind-set of white South Africans, who invoke "trek" and kraal metaphors to assert, in a clear denial of reality, that Black aspirations to self-government could be countered by a resolute pioneering spirit. In the novel, the Nationalist Party is ...
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 ...