SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 April 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 14 April 2026
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Watson, Ian
(1943-2026) UK teacher and author who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for New Worlds in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for six years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he became a full-time writer in 1976, publishing around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Moody, Rick
(1961- ) US author whose novels, beginning with Garden State (1992), tend to focus on the travails of survival in late twentieth-century urban America, the best known of these tales being The Ice Storm (1994). Two of the three novellas assembled in Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (coll 2007) edge close to the fantastic; the third, "The Albertine Notes" (in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales, anth 2003, ...
Meier, Shirley
(1960- ) Canadian author, artist and poet who began to publish work of genre interest in the Shared World of the Fifth Millennium Fantasy series which she co-created with S M Stirling: Meier's credited contributions begin with The Sharpest Edge (1986; vt Saber and Shadow 1992) with S M ...
Surface
US tv series (2005-2006). Rock Fish Productions/NBC Universal Television for NBC-TV. Created by Jonas and Josh Pate. Produced by Ed Milkovich, Joy Beattie, Dan Dworkin and Darcy Meyers. Directors included Jeffrey Reiner, John Behring and Bill Eagles. Writers included Beattie, Dworkin and Chip Johannessen. Cast includes Lake Bell, Jay R Ferguson, Eddie Hassell, Carter Jenkins, Leighton Meester and Rade Šerbedžija. 14 43-minute episodes. Colour. / Oceanographer Laura ...
Dawson, Saranne
Pseudonym of US author Saranne Hoover (1941- ), who has also written as by Pamela Lind; she is the author of one sf romance, Greenfire (1990), under her own name, a Science Fantasy about the female leader of a tribe called upon to breed an heir, with some absent-minded references to Exogamy. From that point, she has written sf only as Saranne Dawson, beginning with The Enchanted Land ...
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 ...