SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 February 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Cherry, Rowena
(1954- ) UK teacher and author of romantic fiction, in US from around the mid 1990s, whose Gods of Tigron sequence beginning with Forced Mate (2004) works through an initial premise that Earth has been secretly quarantined from the Galactic Empire of the title. Complex disputes characterize the romantic Space Opera tone of the whole, perhaps intensified more than usually encountered ...
Brandner, Gary
(1930-2013) US author, almost all of whose works are either horror tales or thrillers, including several film Ties; he worked under his own name, which has sometimes been given as Gary Barander, and as Nick Carter, Phil Garrison, Clayton Moore and Lee Davis Willoughby. Of his large output, the best known title is The Howling (1977), a Werewolf story which was loosely adapted for the ...
Saffron, Robert
(1918-1985) US journalist, television screenwriter and author of The Demon Device: A Novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as Communicated to Robert Saffron (1979), a mildly speculative Alternate History set in World War One, with Arthur Conan Doyle sent off by his government to destroy a German secret Weapon; he is successful. [JC]
Castillo, Elaine
(1984- ) US author, in UK from 2009, later again in America. Her first novel, the nonfantastic America Is Not the Heart (2018), exuberantly anatomizes the Filipino experience in the destination state of California; she is of sf interest for her second novel, the Near Future Moderation (2025), whose protagonist works as a "content moderator" for the manipulative ...
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 ...