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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
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 ...
Shuttle, Penelope
(1947- ) UK poet and author, married to Peter Redgrove (whom see for their sf collaborations) until his death in 2003. Jesusa (1971 chap) is an expressionist presentation of Sex seen as metamorphic, mythopoeic. Her only full-length solo fiction of genre interest, The Mirror of the Giant: A Ghost Story (1980), combines Feminist self-analysis with elements of ...
Curtis, A C
(1867-? ) UK author of a Future War novel, A New Trafalgar: A Tale of the Torpedo Fleet (1902), whose focus is (as the title indicates) on naval operations. [JC]
d'Arch Smith, Timothy
(1936- ) UK bibliographer, antiquarian bookseller, and author, whose wit and scholarly predilections – Montague Summers (see Bibliographies), Aleister Crowley, rock 'n' roll, and cricket (see Games and Sports) – inform his contribution to the genre. Alembic (1992) is a work of Hard SF that joins alchemy, rock 'n' roll (see ...
Taylor, D J
(1960- ) UK literary critic, biographer and author whose novels have normally not ventured into the fantastic; of sf interest, however, is The Windsor Faction (2013), an Alternate History tale set at the end of the 1930s in Britain, with Edward VIII (who in the real world abdicated in 1936) still on the throne (see Jonbar Point). Though affected by a demureness typical of ...
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 ...