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
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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 ...
Higginson, S J
(? -? ) US author of a Lost Race novel, A Princess of Java: A Tale of the Far East (1887; vt Java: The Pearl of the East 2007), the race in question found in the interior of the eponymous Island. [JC]
Predator
Film (1987). Amercent/American Entertainment/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by John McTiernan. Written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas. Cast includes Elpidia Carrillo, Bill Duke, Kevin Peter Hall, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. 106 minutes. Colour. / A special-forces group undertaking a commando-style rescue mission in South America clashes bloodily with guerrillas and then very much more bloodily with the Predator: an intelligent Alien (Hall) that ...
Information Theory
Claude E Shannon (1916-2001), American mathematician and computer scientist, published work on encoding Communications and articulated fundamental theoretical principles from Mathematics in his paper "A mathematical theory of communication" (July-October 1948 Bell System Technical Journal; in The Mathematical Theory of Communication 1949). The paper defines various key terms including, most interestingly, ...
Larkin, Bob
(1949- ) US artist who from the early 1970s painted many covers for Comics, magazines and paperbacks, the latter including several Marvel Comics paperback collections of graphic material; he has also been credited, perhaps by accident, as Robert Larkin. His characteristic punchy designs with strong colours and bold central figures were well suited to the 1970s/1980s Bantam paperback reissues of the ...
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 ...