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 ...
Suvin, Darko
(1934- ) Croatian-born academic, sf critic and poet, born and raised in the part of Yugoslavia that became Croatia; PhD from Zagreb University, where he taught 1959-1967; from 1968 until his retirement as full professor of English at McGill University, Montreal, he lived in Canada; he now lives in Italy. Suvin has been very closely associated with the development of academic interest in ...
de Saint-Martin, Louis Claude
(1743-1803) French philosopher and author, who published most of his nonfiction as by Le Philosophe Inconnu. Much of this output concerned his advocacy of the form of esoteric mysticism known as Martinism, a designation which confusingly refers not to de Saint-Martin but to Martinez de Pasqually (?1727-1774), whose doctrines resemble Rosicrucianism (see Johan Valentin Andreae) and its progeny, including Freemasonry. De Saint-Martin's only fictional ...
Bernal, J D
(1901-1971) UK physicist and political philosopher, Marxist polemicist, whose The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929 chap) manages, with astonishing clarity and concision, to provide models for the understanding and exploitation of the future that sf writers – some knowingly, some ignorant of this small work – would mine for decades. Its influence was acknowledged by Olaf ...
Marvel Science Stories
US Pulp magazine, nine issues August 1938 to April 1941, revived for a further six issues November 1950 to May 1952; published by Postal Publications (first two issues), then by Western Fiction Publishing for the remainder of the first series, and finally by Stadium Publishing, all in New York, and all imprints of the publishers Martin and Abraham Goodman who would launch Marvel Comics in 1939. The first series was edited, uncredited, by Robert O Erisman ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...