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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.
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 ...
Miller, William Amos
(circa 1875-? ) UK-born author, in USA from childhood, who briefly describes his experience of being both blind and deaf in the preface to his Utopia, The Sovereign Guide: A Tale of Eden (1898), whose San Francisco-based protagonist, on a visit to Rome, is taken by an angel to a Magnet-powered submarine which conducts him downwards into the Hollow Earth. Here he ...
Porta, Antonio
Pseudonym of Italian poet and author Leo Paolazzi (1935-1989), whose sf novel, Il re del maggazino (1978; trans Lawrence R Smith as The King of the Storeroom 1992), follows the travels and ruminations of its dying protagonist as he traverses a distant Near Future Italy ravaged by Ecological degradation, a Dystopia in the last throes of terminal dissolution. At the end of the ...
Boys' Papers
Although boys' papers could easily be dismissed as being of negligible literary value, perhaps unjustly since Upton Sinclair and other eminent authors found their footing there, they played an important role in the History of SF in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, by creating a potential readership for the SF Magazines and by ...
Knipfel, Jim
(1965- ) US journalist and author whose Slackjaw column (1987-current) in a succession of fringe papers has a loyal following. His first novel, The Buzzing (2003), is a gonzo tale of Paranoia in a New York increasingly devastated by no longer imaginary Monsters; possibly it was all a dream, though the tale loses interest if deflated in this fashion. ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...