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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
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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 ...
Burnet, W Hodgson
(1873-1933) UK architect and author, whose Parodies include Quite So Stories (coll 1918), which makes mild fun of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (coll 1902). In Gullible's Travels in Little-Brit (1920), a giant Gulliver from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) (see Great and Small; ...
Identity Exchange
The two-way version of Identity Transfer (which see). Although less plausible than one-way transfer in which the victim's personality is destroyed or suppressed, such identity swaps have a satisfying narrative neatness. The exchange of bodies and resulting forced education in another's viewpoint presents opportunities for Humour, exploited in such popular novels as F Anstey's ...
Carter, Lauren
(1972- ) Canadian author whose first novel, the Near-Future Dystopian Swarm (2013), which is set at a time after fossil fuels have finally been depleted, follows its protagonist on a dangerous hegira into a ruined City for provender; her return to something like primordial wilderness, which in some narrative traditions might signal the ...
Night that Panicked America, The
Made-for-tv film (1975). ABC TV. Directed by Joseph Sargent. Written by Nicholas Meyer, Anthony Wilson, based partly on the text of the original 1938 Radio play War of the Worlds by Howard Koch. Cast includes Michael Constantine, Cliff De Young, Vic Morrow and Paul Shenar. 100 minutes, cut to 78 minutes. Colour. / The film recreates the 1938 Orson ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...