SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
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 ...
Aitmatov, Chingiz
(1928-2008) USSR-born Kyrgyz author and diplomat; his native province of the then USSR, Kirghizia, became Kyrgyzstan in 1991, though his formative experiences as an author after 1952 or so were as a convinced citizen of and advocate of the Communist government of the USSR; he remained a respected figure for the whole of his long career. He is known mostly for his mainstream fiction (for which he had been a Nobel Prize candidate), which poetically depicts ...
Green, Robert
(?1935- ) Canadian author and musician whose The Great Leap Backward (1968) depicts a future where Computers have taken over the cities, leaving the countryside in a natural state. [JC]
Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
Film (1980). Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox. Executive producer George Lucas. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Written by Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by Lucas. Cast includes Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Frank Oz and Billy Dee Williams. 124 minutes, re-released Special Edition 127 minutes (1997). Colour. / A first viewing of this blockbuster sequel to ...
Taylor, Charles Henry
(1863-1950) US lawyer, entrepreneur and author of By Wireless from Venus (1922), a lightly fictionalized report, conveyed by radio Communications from Venus, describing life in the Solar System. Some civilizations are advanced Utopias but others are not. [JC]
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 ...