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 ...
New Ceres
Australian Shared World professional Online Magazine published by Twelfth Planet Press, Yokine, Western Australia and produced by Alisa Krasnostein, with just two issues, September 2006 and March 2007. This was an ambitious attempt to create an online world, New Ceres, a long colonized planet that embraced the Age of Enlightenment but had yet to move on (see ...
Invention
This thematic topic is closely linked to that of Discovery (which see), but has a considerably broader scope since sf inventions are not necessarily based on brand-new discoveries but can result from a synthesis of existing principles by Scientists, Mad Scientists, or (frequently) a Common Man with a lucky insight. Further entries with substantial discussion of inventions include ...
Blake's 7
UK tv series (1978-1981). BBC TV. Created by Terry Nation. Producers David Maloney (seasons 1-3), Vere Lorrimer (season 4). Script editor Chris Boucher. Writers included Nation (all episodes in the first season), Boucher, James Follett, Robert Holmes, Tanith Lee. Cast includes Jan Chappell (Cally), Brian Croucher (Travis; season 2), Paul Darrow, Stephen ...
Thrust
US Semiprozine, originally a Fanzine, advertised as quarterly but in its earlier years often irregular; edited by D Douglas Fratz with Steven Goldstein as managing editor #1-#5 and sole editor of #6; 44 issues 1973-1992, #43/#44 being a double issue. / Thrust #1 appeared in February 1973 as the magazine of the University of Maryland Science Fiction Society, with the first two issues ...
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 ...