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 ...
Johnston, Paul
(1957- ) Scottish author, partially resident in Greece, whose noirish Quint Dalrymple sequence – comprising Body Politic (1997), The Bone Yard (1998), Water of Death (1999), The Blood Tree (2000), The House of Dust (2001), Heads or Hearts (2015), Skeleton Blues (2016) and Impolitic Corpses (2019) – is a series of detections set in the ...
Lamartine, Alphonse De
(1790-1869) French poet and political thinker who probably did not write in 1843 (as claimed by its publisher) the Future History published in English as Time on My Hands (1848); it depicts a complex and somewhat pixilated pattern of confederacies in Europe, with various scientific achievements to boast of, though not clearly. [JC]
Night of the Carrots, The
Estonian animated film (1998; original title Porgandite öö). Eesti Joonisfilm. Directed and written by Priit Pärn. Narration by Frank Boyle. 29 minutes. Colour. / Diego, lover of the round, hater of the angular, arrives at PGI hoping to book a room. A sprawling, architecturally unappealing structure, PGI is a hotel (perhaps also a sanatorium) and, as the queues outside attest, much in demand: getting a ...
Hallums, James R
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of the unremarkable They Came, They Saw (1965), set in a 1979 world menaced by the threat of Invasion. [JC]
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...