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 ...
He Xi
(1971- ) Pen-name for an unidentified Chinese author and multiple Yinhe Award-winner, perhaps best known for his reworking of Chinese Mythology in "Ban Gu" (1996 Kehuan Shijie). A student at the Chengdu University of Science and Technology, He enjoyed a flurry of short story publications after his debut "Yiye Fengkuang" ["One Crazy Night"] (1991 ...
Moon Pilot
Film (1962). Walt Disney Films (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by James Neilson. Written by Maurice Tombragel, based on Starfire (19 March-2 April 1960 Saturday Evening Post as "Moon Pilot"; 1960; vt Moon Pilot 1962) by Robert Buckner. Cast includes Brian Keith, Tommy Kirk, Edmond O'Brien, Dany Saval, Kent Smith, Bob Sweeney and ...
Everman, Welch D
(1946-2004) US author and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with contributions to the "TZ Video" column in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine from December 1985 to June 1987. His books relevant to this encyclopedia are the Jerzy Kosinski study Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation (1991) and the Cinema-related ...
Webster, J Provand
(? -? ) UK author whose The Oracle of Baal: A Narrative of Some Curious Events in the Life of Professor Horatio Carmichael, M.D. (1896) is a complicatedly told Lost Race tale for boys. In 1750, a century before the main narrative begins, an ancestor of the protagonist is seduced by a She figure originally from Africa but now in Scotland; the two become pirates before returning to the hidden ...
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 ...