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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.
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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 ...
Rodgers, Alan
(1959-2014) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Boy who Came Back from the Dead" in Masques #2 (anth 1987) edited by J N Williamson (1932-2005), a strongly moving fantasy tale later assembled with other work in New Life for the Dead (coll 1991). Rodgers's first novel, Blood of the Children (1989), is horror, but his second, Fire (1990), combines sf and horror in a Near-Future ...
Coville, Bruce
(1950- ) US author of sf and fantasy, mostly the latter, almost exclusively juveniles. Of some sf interest are: Murder in Orbit (1987; vt Space Station ICE-3 1987); My Teacher Is an Alien (1989) and its sequels, My Teacher Fried My Brains (1991), My Teacher Glows in the Dark (1991), all three assembled as My Teacher Is an Alien: 3 Books in One (omni 1995), plus and ...
Harbinson, W Allen
(1941- ) UK author who has published at least twenty-five combat novels, none of them with fantastic content, as by Shaun Clarke, and who under his own name is best known for his exercises in the sf of Paranoia, most of this material based on the notion that our planet – either at the ultimate behest of Aliens or of a Pariah Elite of humans – is investigating or governing ...
Super-Pets
Since humans have long enjoyed close companionships with animals – mostly Cats and Dogs, though many other animals have functioned as pets – it was probably inevitable that Superheroes would be accompanied by supportive animals sometimes sharing their amazing abilities. Several of these were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s, though none achieved great popularity; as ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...