SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 5 September 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.
Site updated on 31 August 2026
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Murray, Will
Working name of US author William Patrick Murray (1953-2026), who showed an interest throughout his career in Superheroes of the Pulp tradition (on which he was a known authority) such as Doc Savage, about which figure he wrote the nonfiction Secrets of Doc Savage (1981 chap). In this context he had been literary agent for Lester Dent's estate since 1979. ...
Ayrton, Elisabeth
(1910-1991) UK author, best known for books on cooking; married first to Nigel Balchin (1933-1951), then to Michael Ayrton (from 1952 until his death in 1975). Her sf novel, Day Eight (1978), portrays a Near-Future world in Ecological extremis, to which Gaia responds through a sudden acceleration in the ...
Brown, Timothy
(1961- ) US author whose first novel Polaris (2014) is a Near Future tale set in Death Valley (see California), an extreme environment which instantly evokes a sense that Climate Change may have deepened sufficiently to have created Ruined Earth conditions, and that the elderly protagonist of the tale, alone with a ...
Lowachee, Karin
(1973- ) Guyana-born author, in Canada from an early age, whose Warchild sequence, comprising Warchild (2002), Burndive (2003) and Cagebird (2005), set in a moderately baroque interstellar Space Opera venue, where a troubled and tradition-bound polity under the control of Earth vies with an Alien race, as seen through the difficult lives of various young men whose ...
FlashForward
US tv series (2009-2010). Phantom Four Films for ABC. Created by Brannon Braga and David S Goyer, based on the novel Flashforward (1999) by Robert J Sawyer. Producers include Braga, Goyer, Samantha Thomas, Jessika Borsiczky, and Vince Gerardis. Writers include Braga, Goyer, Sawyer, Lisa Zwerling, Scott M Gimple, and Seth Hoffman. Directors include Goyer, Bobby Roth, Nick Gomez, John Polson, and Constantine Makris. Cast includes Joseph ...
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 ...