SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine
US letter-size print magazine published by Montcalm Publishing, New York, under licence to Viacom Enterprises and Carolyn Serling, widow of Rod Serling. It was a companion to the men's magazine Gallery. It ran for sixty issues from April 1981 to June 1989; monthly until December 1982, thereafter bi-monthly. It was edited by T E D Klein until August 1985, Michael Blaine October 1985-October 1986, and finally Tappan ...
Planet Stories
US Pulp magazine, 71 issues, Winter 1939 to Summer 1955, published by Love Romances Publishing (a subsidiary of Fiction House), edited by Malcolm Reiss (Winter 1939-Summer 1942), Wilbur S Peacock (Fall 1942-Fall 1945), Chester Whitehorn (Winter 1945-Summer 1946), Paul L Payne (Fall 1946-Spring 1950), Jerome Bixby (Summer 1950-July 1951), Malcolm Reiss (September 1951-January 1952), Jack O'Sullivan (March ...
Polish Sociological SF
A term coined in the 1980s in the wake of the proliferation and popularity of novels and short stories employing science-fictional tropes to allegorically depict and critically analyse either pathologies of the Polish communist state or totalitarianism in general. Several writers were involved in initiating the school, yet in the early 1980s, when most of Janusz A Zajdel's novels were published, he became its most prolific and popular writer, and as a result ...
Ohlander, Ben
(1965- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with the short fantasy "Smoke and Mirrors" in Magic: The Gathering: Tapestries (anth 1995) edited by Kathy Ice and Tied to the Collectible Card Game. His novels are Enemy of My Enemy (1995) with David Drake, a tie (written chiefly by Ohlander) to the ...
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 ...