SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 20 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 19 January 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Jupiter [magazine]
UK Amateur Magazine edited and published by Ian Redman, Yeovil, Somerset. It was published on a reliable quarterly schedule from Summer (July) 2003 in print form – also since #32 (April 2011) – downloadable in digital form – until is ceased publication with #41 (October 2015). The paper version was a slim (32 pages) A5 format, unprepossessing with a black-and-white cover but no other artwork; colour covers appeared only rarely, beginning ...
Cockcroft, T G L
(1926-2013) New Zealand fan and bibliographer, in employment with IBM from the pre-electronic punched-card era. In spite of his relative isolation in New Zealand, he was a regular Fanzine contributor and corresponded with Fandom worldwide from an early age. He had letters published in Amazing Stories in the mid-1940s, but his main contributions to the genre were detailed bibliographies, in particular ...
Brex, J Twells
(1873-1920) UK journalist and author, active from the 1890s, some of his work being contributed to Boys' Papers; The Civil War of 1915 (1912) describes a Near Future class war in Britain. "Scare-Mongerings" from the Daily Mail 1896-1914: The Paper That Foretold the War (anth 1914 chap) assembles claimed Predictions of World War One, some ...
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 ...