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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 ...
Johnson, W Ryerson
(1901-1995) US Pulp magazine editor and author whose chief sf relevance is a small contribution to the extensive Doc Savage franchise during its 1933-1949 run in Doc Savage magazine. His three titles in the resulting Doc Savage novel series, all written with Lester Dent and published as by Kenneth Robeson, are ...
Danvers, Dennis
(1947- ) US author who concentrated on fantasy and horror for the first part of his career, which began with Wilderness (1991), an effective werewolf novel; he began writing sf novels with the Circuit of Heaven sequence comprising Circuit of Heaven (1998) and End of Days (1999), set in a somewhat fantasticated, highly febrile Virtual Reality environment, dominated by an afterworld-like ...
Gay, Anne
(1952- ) UK teacher and author, married to Stan Nicholls (1949- ), who began publishing sf with "Wishbone" in Gollancz-Sunday Times Best SF Stories (anth 1987) edited anonymously; she has used her married name Anne Nicholls for later short fiction. Her first novel, Mindsail (1990) – like all her works it is a Planetary Romance – promisingly describes an alien planet to ...
Zager and Evans
US pop group comprising Denny Zager (1943- ) and Rick Evans (1943-2018). The Platonic form of the one-hit-wonder, Zager and Evans topped both US and UK charts with their earnest anthem "In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" (1969) and never afterwards had another hit record. The song hops at 1010-year intervals from the title date through to the Far Future of the ninety-sixth century ("In the year 9595, I'm kinda wonderin' if Man ...
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 ...