SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 February 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Maniac
US online tv series (2018). An Anonymous Content, Paramount Television, Parliament of Owls and Rubicon TV production for Netflix. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. Written by Nick Cuse, Amelia Gray, Danielle Henderson, Mauricio Katz, Patrick Somerville and Caroline Williams, based loosely on the Norwegian tv series Maniac (2015). Cast includes Gabriel Byrne, Sally Field, Jonah Hill, Sonoya Mizuno, Emma Stone and Justin Theroux. Ten episodes of between 26 and 47 minutes. ...
Joyce, Graham
(1954-2014) UK author and from 1996 also a reader in and teacher of creative writing at Nottingham Trent University, Nottinghamshire. He began to publish work of genre interest with Dreamside (1991), in which four university students involved in an experimental study of lucid dreaming develop a shared hallucination or alternate reality known as Dreamside, which they reject after bad experiences but which returns to haunt them in later life; the effect is one of ...
Woods, Lance
(1961- ) US author whose Heroic Park (2012) is set mainly in a Near Future Theme Park where ordinary humans can escape constant comparisons with the Superheroes who infest the world outside. But trouble looms, both in the caverns Underground where the park is run, and in the manufactured New York ...
Bertram, Noel
Pseudonym of Noel Boston (1910-1966), and not, as has often been thought, of his friend R L Fanthorpe. Bertram privately published some supernatural stories as Yesterday Knocks (coll 1953; exp 2003 as Boston); his ten tales 1960-1962 in Supernatural Stories, the Badger Books magazine whose contents were mostly written by Fanthorpe, have been verified. [SH/DRL]
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 ...