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
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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 ...
Walker, W H
Pseudonym of UK-born surveyor, politician, journalist and author George Ranken (1827-1895), mainly in Australia from 1851; some of his journalism was published as by Capricornus. The Invasion (1877) as by W H Walker relocates the Battle of Dorking mode to Australia, where a Near Future Invasion by Russia is expeditiously repulsed by the savvy Australian soldiery. [JC]
Shea, Michael [2]
(1946-2014) US author, mostly of Fantasy; most of his few sf stories focus on Horror in SF motifs extracted directly from the work of H P Lovecraft, as in The Color Out of Time (1984), a sequel to Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space (September 1927 Amazing; 1982 chap) (see Sequels by Other Hands), ...
Holt-White, W
(1878-1937) UK journalist, film producer – he was the Head of the Editorial Department for a UK propaganda newsreel, The War Office Official Topical Budget in 1917 and 1918 – and author in various genres, in which capacity he produced nine novels of interest. In The Earthquake: A Romance of London in 1907 (1906) a ruined London is taken in hand by an aristocratic Prime Minister; Holt-White explicitly stated that he based the tale on ...
Hardart, F E
(1913-1992) US teacher, mechanical engineer and author, who published at least one item as Flossie Hardart during her short writing career. Her name has sometimes been given in error as Frank E Hardart. One of a relatively small number of female fans before World War Two (see Fandom; History of SF), she began to publish work of genre interest with "The Devil's Pocket" in Astonishing Stories ...
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 ...