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 ...
Operation: Peril
US Comic (1950-1953). American Comics Group (ACG). 16 issues. Artists include Ken Bald, Ogden Whitney and George Wilhelms. Scriptwriters include Richard Hughes. #1-#6, 52 pages; #7-#16, 36 pages. At first each issue had three long strip series (#1 and #3 also having an additional one-off strip), some short text stories, plus various short strips (usually non-fiction); from #12 the series strips increased to four. / ...
Nance, John J
(1946- ) US author of Orbit (2006), a near-space adventure set in the very Near Future, in which a passenger on an "adventure" Spaceship is left alone after a micrometeorite kills the pilot; his rescue is co-ordinated through an ironized drama of Communications, as the laptop Computer upon which he writes his seemingly dying ...
Munsey, Frank A
(1854-1925) US newspaper and magazine publisher and author. He began publishing in 1882 with The Golden Argosy, a weekly Boys' Paper, later transformed into The Argosy. Munsey expanded his titles to include Munsey's Magazine, The Scrap Book, The All-Story, Cavalier ...
Cinemacabre
Digest-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine printed on slick paper. Publisher: George Stover. Editor: John E Parnum. Seven issues 1979 to 1988; no publication schedule listed, although issues were given quarterly cover dates. / This high-quality Semiprozine was an unofficial continuation of Stover's Fanzine Black Oracle, of which ten issues appeared from 1969 to 1979. Cinemacabre ...
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 ...