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Tuesday 20 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Sobel, Robert
(1931-1999) US academic and author, almost exclusively of nonfiction studies in business history. His only sf novel, For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga (1973), is an Alternate History of post-Revolution America, written in the form of a textbook, with maps and hundreds of footnotes to imaginary sources. The Jonbar Point of the book is the victory of General Burgoyne at Sarasota in October 1777, ...
Chabon, Michael
(1963- ) US author whose stories and novels frequently invoke and inhabit the fantastic, though most often the sophisticated and fluent Equipoise of his telling of these varied tales prohibits any pigeonholing definition of most of the stories assembled in A Model World and Other Stories (coll 1991) or Werewolves in Their Youth (coll 1999) as Fantasy or supernatural ...
Meredith, Richard C
(1937-1979) US author who began publishing sf with "The Slugs" for Knight magazine in November 1962. His first novel, The Sky Is Filled with Ships (1969), is an effective Space Opera in which colonies revolt against a tyrannical corporation. We All Died at Breakaway Station (January-March 1969 Amazing; 1969) is a bleak, well-crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a scarred ...
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 ...