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 ...
McKinney, Jack
Collaborative pseudonym of Brian C Daley and James Luceno for a series of Ties to the Robotech Television series of Mecha cartoon adventures; also for the unrelated Black Hole Travel Agency sequence, about the threatened use of Earth as an amusement park for Aliens. [JC/DRL]
Smiling Friends
Australian/US animated tv series (2020; 2023-current). Princess Bento. Created, directed and written by Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack. Voice cast includes Michael Cusack, Zach Hadel and Marc M. Seventeen 11-minute episodes. Colour. / Smiling Friends is an organization dedicated to cheering people up: working from a building shaped like a giant smiley-face emoji, its members visit the despondent and attempt to bring a smile to their faces. The focus is ...
Weitz, Chris
(1969- ) US screenwriter, producer, director and author, whose version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (2007), which he directed and for which he wrote the screenplay, received some criticism for its softening of the author's iconoclastic take on Religion. Weitz is of specific sf interest for his Young World sequence comprising The Young World (2014), ...
Harrison, Craig
(1942- ) UK-born playwright and author, in New Zealand from 1966, whose work embodies consistently anti-racist themes. The material initially expounded in the play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (performed 1974; 1975) is developed in Broken October: New Zealand, 1985 (1976), which depicts an authoritarian Dystopia, with Maoris able to travel only when issued with passes; the American government colludes with the ...
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 ...