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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Probe [tv]
US tv series (1988). MCA Television for ABC-TV. Created by Isaac Asimov and William Link. Executive Producer: Michael I Wagner. Directors included Rob Bowman, Robert Iscove, Vincent McEveety and Virgil W Vogel. Writers included Asimov, Wagner, James L Novack and Michael Piller. Cast includes Ashley Crow, Jon Cypher, Clive Revill and Parker Stevenson. Two-hour pilot film plus six 45-minute episodes. Colour. / Reclusive, socially awkward scientific ...
Carr, Caleb
(1955-2024) US military historian, scriptwriter and author, active from the mid-1970s, whose nonfiction, mostly on military matters, culminated in The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians; Why It Has Always Failed and Why It will Fail Again (2002), which advocates preemptive strikes against nations deemed to support terrorists; his optimistic take on the consequences of such actions makes this a document of some historical interest (see ...
Brown, John Young
(1856-1921) US educator and author. The protagonist of his sf novel, To the Moon and Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and Adventure (1922), hitches a ride on a Spaceship powered by Antigravity device to the Moon. The discovery of Selenites there turns out to be a hoax but the trip was real. The posthumous publication of the tale was arranged by residents of the ...
Garbo, Norman
(1919-2017) US painter and author, active in the former capacity from around 1940, whose Near Future novel, The Movement (1969), grimly extrapolates late-1960s-style confrontations between US students and police into the takeover of a vast university campus and retaliatory bombing by the government. The coherence of the student movement is exaggerated, but the Computer- and bureaucracy-dominated world they hope to ...
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 ...