SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 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 ...
Shepard, Jim
(1956- ) US academic and author, active from the 1990s. Some of the short stories assembled in his third collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (coll 2007), are of sf interest. Nosferatu (1997; vt Nosferatu in Love 1998), though nonfantastic, conceives of F W Murnau (1888-1931) as being intimately haunted by the protagonist of his most famous film, Nosferatu (1922). / Shepard is of specific sf interest for his ...
Brown, Peter
(1979- ) US illustrator and author whose Wild Robot fiction sequence beginning with The Wild Robot (2016) combines Children's SF with Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The central character is a female Robot whose Transportation box is initially washed up on the shore ...
Everglade, Mark
(? - ) US journalist and author who has published reviews and commentary on Cyberpunk writers and issues; he began publishing fiction of genre interest with "Pay-to-Play" in Neo Cyberpunk: The Anthology (anth 2021) edited by Matthew A Goodwin, Anna Mosikat and Marlin Seigman. The Gliese 581g sequence beginning with Hemispheres (2020) is set on humanity's last inhabited planet, a ...
Sheng Keyi
(1973- ) Chinese author who came to writing as a mature student after late teens and twenties spent in a variety of professions. Her stories frequently dwell on the formative event of her teenage years – the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, which she observed first through the prism of state media, and only later came to appreciate as a moment of deeper resonance. / A strong thread of Feminism runs ...
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 ...