SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 24 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
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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 ...
Sim, Dave
(1958- ) Canadian artist and author, creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, the abrasive and perverse eponymous star of a satirical Comic book originally intended as a pastiche of Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian, and which has lampooned a number of the leading characters of the Heroic-Fantasy and comics genres. The comic book features several ...
Waltermire, Beecher W
(1858-1932) US lawyer and author, father of the weird fiction author Arthur B Waltermire (1888-1938); he is of some sf interest for The Adventure of a Skeleton: A Tale of Natural Gas (1890), whose abnormally thin protagonist manages to slip down an oil well into the Hollow Earth, where he finds a fantasy-tinged world, and has adventures there. [JC]
Graudin, Ryan
(? - ) US author of novels for the Young Adult market, her All That Glows sequence beginning with All That Glows (2014) being fantasy. The Walled City (2014) steps Equipoisally sideways from the kind of Dystopian tale, set in a City, that is often found in early twenty-first century work for young ...
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 ...