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 ...
Spore
Videogame (2008). Maxis. Designed by Will Wright. Platforms: Mac, Win. / The Panspermia theory formulated by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arrhenius hypothesizes that life is spread throughout the universe by drifting seeds, or spores. The game of Spore begins with a single cell, deposited in the ocean of an unknown planet by a convenient meteor; the player's goal is to ...
Taylor, Travis S
(1968- ) US aerospace engineer, optician, broadcaster and author whose Hard SF Warp Speed sequence beginning with Warp Speed (2004) updates elements of the Edisonade as its multi-talented protagonist, named in part after Robert A Heinlein, creates a Hyperspace drive which opens the galaxy to an expanding human race; it also ...
Campion, Sarah
Pseudonym of UK-born teacher, journalist and author Mary Rose Coulton (1906-2002), author of Father: A Portrait of G G Coulton (1948), an impressive biography of her father George Gordon Coulton, the important scholar who also wrote Friar's Lantern (1906), a Timeslip tale. Her fourth novel, Thirty Million Gas Masks (1936), is a Near Future ...
Brissett, Jennifer Marie
(1969- ) London-born software engineer and author, in USA from the age of four, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Executioner" in Warrior Wisewoman 2 (anth 2009) edited by Roby James. The apparent over-complicatedness of her first novel, Elysium (2014), dissolves in the unpacking of the intricate but lucid story, which is initially set in an unnamed (but identifiable) version of New York, where a ...
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 ...