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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
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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 ...
Orkow, Ben
(1896-1988) Russian-born author, in US from 1906 and naturalized in 1924, mostly of plays and film scripts; he also wrote as B Harrison Orkow. In his sf novel When Time Stood Still (1962) a couple travel via Suspended Animation to 2007 CE, where advances in Medicine may offer a cure to her fatal disease. [JC]
Rutherford, Meg
(1932-2006) Australian sculptor, illustrator and author, in UK at least intermittently from 1958; she is of some sf interest for The Beautiful Island (graph 1969), which is collage-based. The narrative is ostensibly pure fantasy – birds persuade the battered houses and edifices of northern lands to migrate south to a paradisal Island – but uses proto-Steampunk devices literally to carry the tale, for the ...
Burnaby, Fred
(1842-1885) UK soldier, traveller and author, almost exclusively of travel books retailing his own exploits in Turkey, Russia and elsewhere. He was co-founder of the magazine Vanity Fair, and his life and opinions combined broad hints of Decadence and a flamboyant high toryism. All of this is reflected in his one work of fiction, the Near-Future Our Radicals: A Tale of Love and Politics (1886 2vols), issued after ...
Goonan, Kathleen Ann
(1952-2021) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Wanting to Talk to You" for Asimovs in 1991; a Round-Robin story, "The Darcy Bee" (February 1998 Omni Online) with John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Jonathan Lethem and Kim Newman, has been dated 1988 in error: it is not her ...
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 ...