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Friday 6 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 ...
Willits, Malcolm
(1934-2019) US film director, bookseller, editor and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "To Not Be Worthy" in Destiny for Winter 1950, along with several other early stories in that journal (see Amateur Magazine), which he himself co-edited with Jim Bradley. He is of more direct sf interest for The Wonderful Edison Time Machine: A Celebration of Life (1999), a Young Adult ...
Kiodomari Allan
Most widely used pen-name of Yukie Mizushima (1910-2008), a Japanese author and interpreter, also sometimes credited variously as Aran Kyōdomari, Tarō Mizushima, Ribō, Zeo Kiodomari and Tarō Urashima. The son of the painter and author Niō Mizushima (1884-1958), Kiodomari was born with strong affinities to Japan's intellectual, modernist and artistic communities. A renowned polyglot, supposedly conversant to some extent in thirty languages, he ...
Hallums, James R
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of the unremarkable They Came, They Saw (1965), set in a 1979 world menaced by the threat of Invasion. [JC]
Attwell, Sydney G
(1882-1975) South African author, resident in New Zealand, whose sf novel Drifting to Destruction (1927) predicts a Near Future Black uprising in his country of origin if its white rulers fail to alter their behaviour (see Race in SF). [JC]
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 ...