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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.
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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 ...
Kosko, Bart
(1960- ) US academic in electrical engineering – specializing in neural networks and machine intelligence (see AI) – and author; he is best known for a speculative nonfiction text, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (1993). His one sf novel is Nanotime (1998), a Technothriller whose title is a neologism describing the speed of Time when it ...
Kingdom of the Spiders
Film (1977). Arachnid Productions/Dimension. Directed by John "Bud" Cardos. Written by Richard Robinson, Alan Caillou, from a story by Jeffrey M Sneller, Stephen Lodge. Cast includes Tiffany Bolling, William Shatner and Woody Strode. 95 minutes, cut to 90 minutes. Colour. / In its modest way, this is one of the better films in the revenge-of-Nature cycle (see Monster Movies). ...
Blind Bargain, A
Film (1922). Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. Directed by Wallace Worsley. Written by J G Hawks, based on The Octave of Claudius (1897) by Barry Pain. Cast includes Virginia True Boardman, Lon Chaney, Fontaine La Rue, Raymond McKee. 57 minutes. Black and white (tinted prints existed). / The film is lost, quite possibly destroyed when Goldwyn was taken over by MGM. The impoverished protagonist, as described in the original novel, comes to an ...
Palmer, Diana
Pseudonym of US author Susan Spaeth Kyle (1946- ), who has also published occasionally under her own name; most of her many novels are Westerns or romance tales, usually as by Palmer. Of sf interest is The Morcai Battalion (1980; rev 2008 as by Palmer), a Space Opera set in a Galactic Empire riven by a vast war. [JC]
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 ...