SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 July 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 7 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute

Sacranie, Raj

(1950-1998) UK poet, journalist and author of a collection of short Space Operas, Stories from Outer Space (coll 1979 chap), none previously published. [JC]

(1910-1974) UK practising physician and author whose first sf novel, The Man They Couldn't Kill (1944), introduces the vastly talented Dr D'eath, a Superman capable of inducing Hypnotic trances at a distance and of scientifically arranging for souls to take out-of-body excursions. Falsely convicted of a murder, D'eath clears his name and might have starred in a sequence of Doc Savage-like adventures had the book ...

Memoirs of a Survivor

Film (1981). Memorial Films/National Film Finance Corporation/EMI. Directed by David Gladwell. Written by Kerry Crabbe, Gladwell, based on The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing. Cast includes Julie Christie, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings and Leonie Mellinger. 115 minutes. Colour. / Amid Near-Future scenes of urban squalor in Western London a middle-aged woman (Christie) observes (mostly ...

Hession, Rónán

(1975- ) Irish musician and author, who has performed from around 2003 in the former capacity as by Mumblin' Deaf Ro. His first novels, Leonard and Hungry Pat (2019) and Panenka (2021), are nonfantastic. His third, Ghost Mountain (2024), features the sudden irruption into the middle of a small town of a sizeable mountain, an event which seems also to have occurred elsewhere. The characters in the tale treat this inexplicable event ...

Trew, Antony

(1906-1996) South African naval officer (mercantile and military) and author, in UK from the early 1960s; in World War Two he eventually commanded his own ship, primarily escorting convoys. His anti-apartheid opinions did not directly inform his fiction, most of it being historical dramas set at sea. Of sf interest are his first novel, Two Hours To Darkness (1962), a Near Future tale whose protagonist, a submarine captain who has gone mad, moves the ...

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 ...