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
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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 ...
Chaykin, Howard V
(1950- ) US author/illustrator, mainly of Comics. Chaykin's first professional work was the 1973 art for Marvel Comics's War of the Worlds (a sequel to H G Wells's novel!) and DC Comics's Sword of Sorcery (which featured Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser). Much of his work has been sf. He was ...
Russell, Karen
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Haunting Olivia" in The New Yorker for 13-20 June 2005; the tale evokes a world and mood to which her work repeatedly returns: the coves, islets, and low-lying inlands of southern Florida, whose Polders [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] and thresholds Russell dramatizes with a sensibility that might be called Florida ...
Visiak, E H
Working name of UK poet, critic (a noted Milton scholar) and author Edward Harold Physick (1878-1972). His fiction – like The Haunted Island (1910) [for subtitles see Checklist], a complex tale featuring ghosts, Magic and piracy – is essentially fantasy, although Medusa: A Story of Mystery, and Ecstasy, & Strange Horror (1929), an almost surreal Fantastic Voyage into unknown seas, gives ...
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 ...