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
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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 ...
Delany, Samuel R
(1942- ) US critic and author, one of the most influential and most discussed within the genre; he has taught at several universities from 1975, and was professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 1988-1999, of English at SUNY Buffalo 1999-2000, and of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia since 2001. He has a somewhat mixed cultural background: he is Black, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and therefore ...
Lancour, Gene
Working name of Gene Louis Fisher (1947- ), US author of the Sword-and-Sorcery Dirshan, the God-Killer sequence featuring a barbarian warrior strenuously in the service of a goddess: The Lerios Mecca (1973), The War Machines of Kalinth (1977), Sword for the Empire (1978) and The Maneaters of Cascalon (1979). Lancour's next book was sf: The Globes of Llarum ...
Buckley, Christopher
(1952- ) US author – son of William F Buckley Jr (1925-2008), himself the author of some fantasy but not sf – whose novels have been Satires of contemporary American life which sometimes edge towards the fantastic. Typical of these is Little Green Man (1999), in which the media pundit protagonist believes he has been abducted by Aliens but has in fact been abducted by a government agency, so ...
Manibo, Victor
(? - ) Filipino lawyer and author, now in US, whose Near Future first novel, The Sleepless (2022), ascribes the eponymous affliction (or benefit) affecting billions of the world's population to a Pandemic. In an America thus affected, lives continue; the protagonist of the tale, an investigative reporter immersed in the Media Landscape, must ...
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 ...