SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Weston, Susan B
(1943- ) US author whose Children of Light (1985), set in a Ruined Earth America that had been direly but not terminally affected by Holocaust, treats the possibilities of human survival with warmth and some plausibility. [JC]
Williams, Scott B
(? - ) US author whose Near Future Pulse sequence beginning with The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (2012) describes in Survivalist Fiction terms life in a post-Disaster America after solar flares have destroyed power grids everywhere; significant members of the cast eventually learn to survive on a Caribbean ...
Illuminati
Card Game (1982). Steve Jackson Games (SJG). Designed by Steve Jackson. / Illuminati is a game of social satire, much influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! sequence, with one simple goal: take over the world. The spirit of Wilson's original trilogy is effectively invoked; the game abounds with ludicrous ...
Dawson, Les
(1931-1993) UK stand-up and television comedian, whose self-mocking, pantomime-based, "working-class" humour made a strong impact on a very wide audience; of his several novels, A Time Before Genesis: A Novel of the Future's Past (1986), a seriously overwritten Near Future tale dousing its sf elements in Horror tropes as the protagonists discover the true masters of the universe. [JC]
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 ...