SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Violet Evergarden
Japanese animated tv series (2018). Kyoto Animation. Based on the Light Novel by Kana Akatsuki (author) and Akiko Takas (illustrator). Directed by Taichi Ishidate. Written by Reiko Yoshida. Voice cast includes Yui Ishikawa, Hidenobu Kiuchi, Takehito Koyasu, Daisuke Namikawa. Thirteen broadcast 24-minute episodes, plus one OVA. Colour. / Violet Evergarden (Ishikawa) was a teenaged soldier in a recently concluded ...
Time Out of Sequence
The Perception of events in a shuffled or apparently random sequence – as distinct from the simple negative of Time in Reverse – is played for laughs in F Anstey's Tourmalin's Time Cheques (A Farcical Extravagance) (1891; vt The Time Bargain; or, Tourmalin's Cheque Book 1905), where it generates an escalating sense of comic confusion. More usually, the effect ...
Mimic
Film (1997). Dimension Films. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on "Mimic" (December 1942 Astonishing Stories) by Donald A Wollheim writing as by Martin Pearson. Cast includes F Murray Abraham, Josh Brolin, Charles Dutton, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeremy Northam and Mira Sorvino. Theatrical cut 105 minutes; Director's Cut 112 ...
John W Campbell Award
Award for the best new sf or fantasy author, selected by votes of sf fans and invariably presented at the Worldcon as part of the Hugo ceremony. There is a two-year eligibility period: an author first published in 2000 would be eligible for the 2001 or 2002 award but not thereafter. Sponsored by Condé-Nast, publishers of Analog, the John W Campbell Award was instituted in 1972 in tribute to John W ...
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 ...