SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Captain Zero
US Pulp magazine, three bimonthly issues, November 1949-March 1950, published by Recreational Reading Corp., Indiana, edited anonymously by Alden H Norton. Each issue contained a novel written by prolific pulp author G T Fleming-Roberts (1910-1968). As a result of a radiation overdose, Captain Zero (alias "The Master of Midnight") becomes involuntarily invisible at night; he uses his unwanted gift to operate against the underworld. When invisible he speaks in ...
Gardner, Craig Shaw
(1949- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Rocket Roll" for Unearth in Spring 1978. He is almost exclusively associated with fantasy, both original titles (chiefly Humour) – beginning with the Ebenezum and Wuntvor humorous romps whose first volume is A Malady of Magics (fixup 1986) [see Checklist below] – and a range of very competent ...
DeMaitre, Edmund
(1906-1991) Hungarian newspaper reporter and author born Ödön Demeter, who covered World War Two for various papers, and who settled permanently in the US after the war; his sf Satire, The Liberation of Manhattan (1949) with Mark J Appleman, comically depicts the invasion of New York by its Soviet liberators. [JC]
Mendlesohn, Farah
(1968- ) UK academic and critic, former Reader in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature at Middlesex University, from 2012 to 2016 Professor of Literary History at Anglia Ruskin University. She trained as an historian, a discipline that has informed all her subsequent critical work on both fantasy and science fiction, taking her DPhil, on American and British Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War, which was published as ...
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 ...