SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 19 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 14 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 ...
Event Horizon
Film (1997). Paramount Pictures. Directed by Paul W S Anderson. Written by Philip Eisner. Cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Richard T Jones, Sam Neill, Jack Noseworthy, Sean Pertwee, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson. 96 minutes. Colour. / In the mid-twenty-first century, an experimental spaceship, the Event Horizon, vanishes without trace in the outer solar system. Seven years later the ship is detected when it sends an ...
Escarpit, Robert
(1918-2000) French academic, Information Theory pioneer, author, and journalist known for satirical pieces in such magazines as Le Monde, Le Matin and Sud-Quest. He is of sf interest for Le littératron; roman picaresque (1964; trans Peter Green as The Novel Computer: A Picaresque Novel 1966), a Satire centred on the Invention of a literary ...
Glasser, Alan
(? - ) US author of an unremarkable sf novel, The Demon Cosmos (dated 1978 but 1980), in which an evil force emanating from a fiery furnace at the heart of the galaxy (see Time Abyss) seems to have taken against humanity. [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 ...