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Tuesday 13 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 12 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 ...
Weird Adventures
US Comic (1952). Ziff-Davis. One issue, numbered #10. Artists include John Celardo and Phil Marini. 36 pages, with four long strips, a two-page text story and a one-page non-fiction strip. / In the 1950s the use of "weird" in a comic's title usually meant a focus on Horror; however, despite one story referring to black Magic, Weird Adventures is best considered an sf ...
Janusz A Zajdel Award
Polish Award for Fantastika chosen by Fandom. This was founded in 1984 at Polcon, the Polish national Convention, and initially named Sfinks, to be presented for literary achievements in the field of sf (later also Fantasy) in the preceding calendar year, so the first award for the year 1984 would be given at the 1985 ...
Escargots, Les
["The Snails"] French animated film (1966). Société des Film d'Art et de Culture. Directed by René Laloux. Written by Roland Topor and René Laloux. 11 minutes. Colour. / This excellent, wordless short is in a very different style to Laloux and Topor's feature-length collaboration, La Planète Sauvage (1973). A farmer is unable to make his crops grow until he discovers ...
North, David
(? - ) US or Canadian author of whom nothing is known – whose Time Warriors sequence of Military SF adventures, beginning with Time Warriors #1: Fuse Point (1991), sends its protagonists, a Vietnam vet and his barbarian sidekick named Brom, via Time Travel into various conflicts and Parallel Worlds, where they act, with ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...