SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 8 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: John Howard
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 ...
Technofantasy
Item of Terminology introduced in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy to denote narratives whose essentially Fantasy nature is more or less disguised by trappings of Technology, though usually with no serious attempt to add scientific or pseudoscientific justification. Even Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's sf ...
Eustace, Robert
Working name of UK physician and author Eustace Robert Barton (circa 1868-1943), known for his collaborations on crime novels with several authors, including L T Meade, Edgar Jepson and Dorothy L Sayers (1893-1957); the 1897-1898 John Bell sequence of short stories with Meade, assembled as A Master of Mysteries (coll of linked stories 1898), appears to feature – but does not, as the tales are all ...
Innes, Hammond
(1913-1998) UK journalist and author of adventure novels, who wrote nonfantastic children's adventure tales as by Ralph Hammond. His earliest work was exclusively devoted to the Peter Deveril sequence of thrillers beginning with the nonfantastic The Doppelganger (1936), featuring a newspaper reporter and criminologist whose investigations sometimes hover at the edge of the fantastic through Inventions involving improbable ...
Tepper, Sheri S
(1929-2016) US author whose first genre publications were poems under her then married name Sheri S Eberhart, the earliest being "Lullaby, 1990" in Galaxy for December 1963. She then fell silent as an author, beginning to write again only once she was in her fifties, producing sf and fantasy as Tepper, a horror novel as by E E Horlak, and non-fantastic detective novels (not listed below) as by B J Oliphant and A J Orde. Her first-written novel, a long, complex work of ...
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 ...