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 ...
Shadowrun
Role Playing Game (1989). FASA. Designed by Bob Charrette, Tom Dowd, Paul Hume. / The setting for Shadowrun is a curious Science and Sorcery fusion of high Fantasy and Cyberpunk, an innovation which greatly appealed to many players but has resulted in adverse comments on its aesthetics from, amongst ...
McHugh, Maureen F
(1959- ) US author (her middle initial stands for nothing) who began publishing sf with "All in a Day's Work" for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988 as by Michael Galloglach. About half of her fairly modest production of stories was assembled as Mothers and Other Monsters: Stories (coll 2005), including "The Lincoln Train" (April 1995 F&SF), which won both ...
Jones, Neil R
(1909-1988) US author who until his retirement in 1973 worked as a New York State unemployment insurance claims investigator. His first published story, "The Death's Head Meteor" (it was the first English-language sf story to use the word "astronaut") in Air Wonder Stories for January 1930, shares with almost all his fiction a very generalized Future History common background – one of the earliest seen in US ...
Davis-Goff, Sarah
(? - ) Irish journalist, publisher and author whose first novel, the Young-Adult Last Ones Left Alive (2019), envisions an Ireland at some point in the moderately distant Near Future, at a point where the planetary Disaster – a Zombie apocalypse probably due in particular to scientific research gone wrong, and to ...
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 ...