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 ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" in Skeleton Crew for March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
Ringdahl, Roar
(1935- ) Norwegian author and editor regarded as the Grand Old Man of Norwegian Fandom. Twelve years before the 1966 foundation of the Oslo Students' SF Club (Aniara), Ringdahl and Cato N Lindberg founded what was later called "The First Norwegian Fandom". In sf magazines of the time they found the addresses of foreign fanzines, and got in touch with some 200 sf fans in Sweden, the UK and the USA. Their first Fanzine ...
Resnick, Mike
Working name of Michael Diamond Resnick (1942-2020), US author and dog-breeder who for most of his career signed his work as given above, though his early titles were often signed as Michael D Resnick. He began his genre career with an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, The Forgotten Sea of Mars (1965 chap); his interest in Burroughs also generated material which he published in ERB-dom Magazine, and his first sequence – the ...
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 ...