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 ...
Gorey, Edward
(1925-2000) US author and artist who produced many book jackets and internal illustrations, often for children's books. As an artist he was essentially self-taught despite a single semester of study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943; his acknowledged influences included Chinese, Japanese and Symbolist art. Though his many covers for Doubleday Anchor books in the 1950s were important in establishing the "quality paperback" as a prestige marketing category, he is best known ...
Wild Blue Yonder, The
Film (2005). Wener Herzog Filmproduktion, Tetramedia, West Park Pictures. Written and directed by Wener Herzog (1942- ). Cast includes Brad Dourif. 81 minutes. Colour. / An unnamed Alien (Dourif) from the titular water planet arrives on Earth, seemingly one of many refugees from his dying world, though he is the only one we see and he does not seem to know the whereabouts of any of the others. The aliens attempt to set up a capital ...
Kaufman, Amie
(? - ) Australian author much of whose work has been in collaboration with Jay Kristoff or Meagan Spooner, most of her output being confined to Young Adult series. She is of sf interest for the Starbound sequence beginning with These Broken Stars (2013) with Spooner, the traditional lines of whose ...
Bonzo Dog Band, The
The Bonzo Dog Band, billed as The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on their earliest singles and first album (and also known as The Bonzo Dog Dada Band), was founded in 1962 by a group of art students including Vivian Stanshall (1943-1995) and joined in 1963 by Neil Innes (1944-2019). They combined various musical styles with surreal Humour anticipating Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974); the band received ...
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 ...