SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 23 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 ...
Jay, Peter
(1937-2024) UK author, economist and former diplomat who served as the UK Ambassador to the USA 1977-1979. His Future History Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy (1987) with Michael Stewart, was inefficient as fiction but acute about the pleasures and miseries of late capitalism, which is portrayed as being consumed by debt; that a despicable populist named Olaf D Le Rith (ie ...
Lightspeed
US professional Online Magazine initially devoted exclusively to science fiction, published by Sean Wallace via Prime Books until December 2011, and edited by John Joseph Adams, who also took over as publisher from January 2012 at which time it also absorbed Fantasy Magazine and made fantasy fiction part of its content. It has appeared monthly as an ...
Collins, Mortimer
(1827-1876) UK poet and author, moderately prolific in various genres; one collection of poetry, The Inn of Strange Meetings and Other Poems (coll 1871), contains Arthurian material. His three novels of sf interest are each of only tangential interest, but are good examples of how sf could be used in nineteenth-century Britain to avoid the implications of scientific discoveries like Evolution. Miranda: A Midsummer Madness (1873 3vols) ...
Perutz, Leo
(1882-1957) Austrian playwright and author, active from around 1905, in active service during most of World War One, being wounded more than once but continuing to write; he emigrated to Palestine [now Israel] in 1938 after the Anschluss. Most of his novels are baroque phantasmagorias, irradiated by parodic transformations of popular genres, including sf. His work, much of which has now been translated into English, has been ...
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 ...