SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 23 January 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 19 January 2026
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von Däniken, Erich
(1935-2026) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
Adams, Scott
(1957-2026) US author and cartoonist best known for the Dilbert strip published from 1989, which when at its best superbly (in terms of concept and accuracy of Satire rather than quality of drawing) satirized contemporary office life and corporate incompetence. As with most ambitious modern comic strips, it segues frequently into sf and fantasy tropes – such as Robot office workers, wish-fulfilling ...
Colvin, Ian
(1912-1975) UK author and journalist whose sf novel is Domesday Village (1948), a Utopia set in a semi-agrarian Near-Future UK with a socialist regime. [JC]
Trevor, Meriol
(1919-2000) UK author whose Alternate-History tales in the World Dionysius sequence – The Forest and the Kingdom (1949), Hunt the King, Hide the Fox (1950) and The Fires and the Stars (1951) – convey a bright childlike nostalgia for a planet which in some regards resembles Earth but whose history is more satisfactory than ours. This angle of view may be accounted for by the fact that, with ...
Absolute Magnitude
US Semiprozine, which began in Spring/Summer 1993, under the title Harsh Mistress; but that name – intended to echo Robert A Heinlein's novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (December 1965-April 1966 If; 1966) – sounded like a bondage magazine to distributors, and the magazine was retitled (its numbering resuming with #1) with its third issue, ...
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 ...