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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 ...
Countdown: The Sky's on Fire
Made-for-tv movie (1998). OTL Productions Incorporated. Directed by Dan Lerner. Written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce Taylor, Gar Anthony Hayward, based on Fatal Exposure (1991) by Michael Tobias. Cast includes Josie Bissett, Ben Browder, John Corbett, Tom Irwin and Bradley Whitford. 89 minutes. Colour. / A painfully low-budget Disaster movie, Countdown: The Sky's on Fire has little to distinguish it ...
Shawn, Wallace
(1943- ) US actor and playwright, very active in the former capacity; some of his roles – including a part of Strange Invaders (1983), the comic villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and Grand Negus Zek in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – are of genre interest. As a playwright, the transgressive and Absurdist works of ...
Ferman, Edward L
(1937- ) US editor, son of Joseph W Ferman; Ferman formally took over the editorship of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in January 1966, a post in which he remained until June 1991, having previously been managing editor since April 1962 under Avram Davidson and then his father. Under Ferman's editorship The ...
Waters, M D
(1978- ) US author whose Archetype sequence comprising Archetype (2014) and Prototype (2014) features a young woman with Amnesia – it is soon revealed that she has suffered a Memory Edit at the hands of her doctors – whose responses to the world into which she is revived are akin to responses typical of protagonists in ...
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 ...