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.
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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 ...
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 ...
Horstman, Thomas
(? - ) US author of a borderline sf tale, The Kessler Alliance (1980), in which a cadre of Nazis hopes to rule the world as Hitler might have (see Hitler Wins for discussion of genuine Alternate Histories on these lines); a sense of Paranoia is duly stirred. [JC]
Bomba Films
A series of twelve Jungle Movies [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] starring Johnny Sheffield, who had played, alongside Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, the part of Tarzan's adopted son Boy in eight of the Tarzan Films; the character came from the Bomba the Jungle Boy series of twenty books written by John William ...
Rudaux, Lucien
(1874-1947) French astronomer and popular-science author and illustrator whose Sur les autres mondes ["On Other Worlds"] (1937) contains many examples of space art, imagining – in terms of current scientific knowledge – the landscapes of the Moon and other planets of our solar system. His depiction of the Moon's surface as consisting of rolling landscapes with rounded mountains and hills (Rudaux even explained his ...
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 ...