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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
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 ...
Disintegrator
In sf Terminology, one of the commonest of hand-held Weapons (see Rays), especially in Space Opera of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may have been a product of squeamishness – or perhaps just neatness – since it creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to sweep up afterwards. The term seems to have been introduced by Nictzin ...
Halo: Combat Evolved
Videogame (2001). Bungie Studios (BS). Designed by John Howard. Platforms: XBox (2001); Mac, Win (2003); rev vt Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary XB360 (2011). / Halo: Combat Evolved is a First Person Shooter, with a linear plot (see Interactive Narrative) which owes much to such sf action films as Aliens ...
MacIsaac, Fred
(1882-1940) US author who appeared frequently in Argosy after World War One with stories in which his sober prophetic intelligence wrestles with his Pulp-magazine instincts, and usually loses. His work remains of interest, however. The Vanishing Professor (9-30 January 1926 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 1927) complicatedly engages a venal Scientist, inventor ...
Donner, Richard
Working name of Richard Donald Schwartzberg (1930-2021), US Television and Cinema director and producer whose early genre or genre-adjacent work for the small screen included directing six episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) – including the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (11 October 1963) written by Richard Matheson – ...
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 ...