SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Kimbriel, Katharine Eliska
(1956- ) US web designer and author whose work of sf interest – though she has published some fantasy stories – is restricted to the Nuala sequence of Planetary Romances: Fire Sanctuary (1986), Fires of Nuala (1988) and Hidden Fires (1991). Threatened by mutations (caused by high radioactivity in the planetary crust) and by intergalactic war, the inhabitants of the ...
Guieu, Jimmy
Working name of French author Henri René Guieu (1926-2000), who also wrote espionage novels as by Jimmy Quint, policiers as by Claude Rostaing, and juveniles as by Claude Vauzière; he also wrote as by Dominique Verseau. Much of his work, both fiction and nonfiction, was devoted to arguing for the existence of UFOs; his ufology texts, as well as his very numerous sf adventures (some of them written as Ties by other authors under his ...
Idol, Billy
(1955- ) Stage name of UK pop star William Michael Albert Broad, who merits mention here only on account of his album Cyberpunk (1993), a punk-electronica concept album inspired by Idol's reading of William Gibson's Neuromancer. Many of Idol's earlier rock-punk songs are catchy, and some have proved enduring, but this album is very bad. [AR]
Foyle, Naomi
(? - ) UK editor, poet and author whose first novel, Seoul Survivors (2013), is a Near Future thriller set just before a meteor known as Lucifer's Hammer threatens to devastate the planet, as in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer (1977), about a Comet striking Earth. A plot to use ...
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 ...