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Thursday 23 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.
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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 ...
Sunn Classic Pictures
US film production and distribution company founded in 1971 by Rayland Jensen and based in Park City, near Salt Lake City, Utah: it was a subsidiary of the Schick razor company (and was sometimes called Schick Sunn Classic Pictures). In 1980 the company was bought by Taft Broadcasting, eventually being renamed Taft International Pictures, until being subsumed into another company in 1987. Sunn Classic made and distributed family films and were early users of audience testing to shape a film's ...
Contact [2]
Russian animated film (1978; original title Kontakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Alexander Kostinsky. 10 minutes. Colour. / An artist wandering the countryside rests by a lake: as he hums to himself, a Spaceship arrives. Its pilot – a Shapeshifting fluorescent triangle-eyed slug-like ...
Beast Must Die, The
Film (1974; vt Black Werewolf). Amicus Productions and the British Lion Film Corporation. Directed by Paul Arnett. Written by Arnett (uncredited), Scott Finch (uncredited) and Michael Winder, based on "There Shall Be No Darkness" (April 1950 Thrilling Wonder Stories) by James Blish. Cast includes Tom Chadbon, Marlene Clark, Peter Cushing, Anton Diffring, Charles Gray, Michael Gambon, Calvin Lockhart and Ciaran Madden. 93 ...
Manuel, Frank E
(1910-2003) US academic and author, married to his collaborator Fritzie P Manuel from 1931 until his death. Some of his early work – like the various articles later assembled as The Politics of Modern Spain (1938), contain prescient analyses of the consequences of the Spanish Civil War. He was a prolific historical scholar, though it is his magnum opus, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979) with Fritzie P ...
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 ...