SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 4 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.
Site updated on 2 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Sallis, James
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work ...
Cities
The city is the focal point of our civilization, and images of the city of the future bring into sharp relief the expectations and fears with which we imagine the future of civilization. Disenchantment with metropolitan life was evident even while Utopian optimism remained strong, and became remarkably exaggerated in Dystopian images of the future. The growth of the cities during the Industrial Revolution created filthy slums where ...
Time Tunnel, The
US tv series (1966-1967). An Irwin Allen Production for Twentieth Century Fox Television/ABC TV. Created by Irwin Allen, also executive producer; very loosely based on Time Tunnel (1964) by Murray Leinster. Directors included Allen (pilot only), Sobey Martin and J Juran. Writers included Harold Jack Bloom, Wanda and Bob Duncan, Peter Germano, William Welch, Carey Wilbur ...
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
Term used to describe a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game with gameplay resembling that of a Computer Role Playing Game. Players create characters with abilities distinct from those of their makers, and use them to explore a shared fictional world and cooperate or compete with each other to fight the enemies they find there. MMORPGs differ from ...
Dos-à-Dos
When two books are bound together so that they share one spine, but with their texts printed upside-down in respect to each other, the composite volume is described in the publishing trade as being bound dos-à-dos (literally "back-to-back"). Such a volume has two front covers and two title pages, which the reader can confirm by turning any example upside-down, revealing a second front cover, right way up, and a second text, likewise. Almost always – though not invariably – ...
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 ...