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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Becker, Kurt
(1916-2010) US priest born in Venezuela with a German father; in the USA from 1924, applied for naturalization in 1946. His sf novel is the Young Adult Countdown! (1958), whose protagonist worries whether or not he'll make the Mars flight; he does. [JC/SH]
Acknowledgments
Virtually all the acknowledgements in the second edition of 1993, as reproduced in the 1995 CD-ROM, still apply – these appear below the following list of third-edition addenda. First come those without whom this online edition would never have appeared. / Gollancz, our publisher from 2011 to 2021, made the third edition possible. The stewardship of the project by Malcolm Edwards and Simon Spanton of Orion/Gollancz is greatly appreciated. Darren ...
Riverside Quarterly
Fanzine (1964-1993) edited by Leland Sapiro from various locations in the USA and Canada; 35 issues from August 1964 to August 1993. / Riverside Quarterly began as a retitled continuation of the fanzine Inside Science Fiction (1953-1963; titled Inside on its 1962 revival), published by Ron Smith and then Jon White, which won a Hugo in 1956 and itself incorporated a still earlier ...
Haibane Renmei
Japanese animated tv series (2002). Radix. Based on the Manga by Yoshitoshi Abe. Directed by Tomokazu Tokoro. Written by Yoshitoshi Abe. Voice cast includes Ryō Hirohashi, Junko Noda, Tamio Ōki and Akiko Yajima. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / A girl dreams of falling whilst a crow tries to prevent her descent. Meanwhile, cigarette-smoking Reki (Noda), wearing a halo and small pair of wings, discovers a giant cocoon in 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 ...