SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Otherside Picnic
Japanese animated tv series (2021). Based on the Light Novels by Iori Miyazawa (illustrated by shirakaba). Liden Films, Felix Film. Directed by Takuya Satō. Written by Takuya Satō. Voice cast includes Yumiri Hanamori, Rina Hidaka, Ai Kayano and Miyu Tomita. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / As the title suggests, this work is influenced by Arkady and Boris Strugatski's ...
Charnock, Anne
(1954- ) UK author whose loose but thematically cogent Calculated Life sequence, comprising A Calculated Life (2012; rev 2013) and The Enclave (2017 chap), depicts a complexly Dystopian Near Future Britain, where advances in Genetic Engineering have had believably mixed consequences: for in a world increasingly controlled by ...
Weber, David
(1952- ) US author of several sf series, usually set in Space Opera arenas, and frequently adhered to the typically contrarian storylines and implied Politics of Military SF. Two sequences stand out (for full details, including omnis, see Checklist below). The Starfire series is based on the Wargame Starfire ...
Dent, John Charles
(1841-1888) UK-born author in Canada from early childhood, of whose The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales (coll 1888) the title story – "The Gerrard Street Mystery" (May 1877 Belford's Monthly) – is a tale of Precognition. Of the other three long tales, "The Haunted House on Duchess Street" is a ghost story. [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 ...