SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 15 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 14 January 2026
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Radon Journal
US Print Magazine / Online Magazine, a Semiprozine of sf, often with horror elements. Triannual, May 2022 to current. / Devised and edited by half-anonymous volunteers (first or second name published only and communications sent collectively from the Radon Editorial Team), the journal's unconventional opaqueness lends credibility to its anti-establishment ethos. Issues comprise prose ...
Elias, Albert J
(1920-2007) US author of some detective fiction and of two sf novels, The Bowman Test (1977), about a possible Reincarnation of the Messiah, and The Sonora Mutation (1978). [JC]
Morris, Wright
(1910-1998) US photographer and author whose first books were "photo-texts" combining photos and fiction; in his later career he won the National Book Award twice, for The Field of Vision (1956) and Plains Song for Female Voices (1980). Of sf interest is The Fork River Space Project: A Novel (1977), in which something like the Near Future world, in the form of UFOs, interpenetrates a dreamlike ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...