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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Ultravox
UK synth-pop band, who as "Ultravox!" (with exclamation mark) released a first eponymous album Ultravox! (1977). A modishly alienated work that uses synthesizers in a doomy and rather melodramatic manner, it nevertheless achieves some atmospheric moments, as in the urban noir of "Saturday Night In The City of the Dead", or the Robot-themed "I Want To Be A Machine". This last song, one of the band's early successes, situates itself in a subordinate ...
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 ...
Curtis, Robert
(1889-1936) UK author, in active service during World War One, whose The Table: The Novel of Edgar Wallace's Film Story (1936) is a Tie to an unfilmed screenplay by Edgar Wallace, for whom Curtis worked as his secretary. A medical experiment goes wrong, resulting in the creation of Zombies who terrorize the mise en scene until defeated. None of Curtis's ...
Demijohn, Thom
Collaborative pseudonym of Thomas M Disch and John T Sladek on the first edition of their mystery novel (not sf) Black Alice (1968). The 1969 British hardback and all subsequent editions used their real names. [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 ...