SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 7 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 6 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Davis, Chandler
(1926-2022) US mathematician, academic and author, in Canada from 1960, after serving a short prison term for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently losing his position as professor at the University of Michigan; in 1991, the university initiated the annual "Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic Freedom" (Mark Nickerson and Clement Markert had also been dismissed after refusing to testify). As a mathematician, he published many influential ...
Watson, Simon
(? - ) UK author of No Man's Land (1975), set in a Dystopian Near Future Britain based on a coercive concentration of the working class community-destructive high-rise tenements. Something similar had in fact happened in the real world during the twentieth century after World War Two, a process flagrantly contradictive of the pre-War English ...
Fox, Henry
(?1911-?1980) London-based UK artist and illustrator, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Art since 1940, who is perhaps unfortunately best known in sf for producing more than 200 covers 1960-1967 for John Spencer and Co's Badger Books, in a trashy style all too well suited to that imprint's demand for rapid delivery rather than quality. Approximately 112 of these cover paintings were for the Badger SF (science fiction) and SN (supernatural) series. Fox had ...
Galaxy's Edge
US professional magazine available in both print and Ebook form, the print edition being letter-size. It is published bi-monthly by Arc Manor, Rockville, Maryland, under Shahid Mahmud and was edited by Mike Resnick from the first issue, March 2013, until his death in January 2020; thereafter it has been edited by Lezli Robyn. / The magazine was unabashedly nostalgic, being a mixture of reprinted gems from the past and adventurous ...
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 ...