SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 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 12 January 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Disintegrator
In sf Terminology, one of the commonest of hand-held Weapons (see Rays), especially in Space Opera of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may have been a product of squeamishness – or perhaps just neatness – since it creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to sweep up afterwards. The term seems to have been introduced by Nictzin ...
They Were Eleven
Japanese animated film (1986; original title Jūichinin Iru!; vt We Were Eleven). Magic Bus. Based on the Manga by Moto Hagio. Directed by Satoshi Dezaki and Tsuneo Tominaga. Written by Toshiaki Imaizumi and Kazumi Koide. Voice cast includes Akira Kamiya and Michiko Kawai. 91 minutes. Colour. / Over several centuries humanity has achieved ...
Moore, Isabel
(? - ) US author whose Near Future tale, The Day the Communists Took Over America (1961), depicts in Cold War terms what comes close to a full outbreak of World War Three: the Soviets have blockaded America, sink her shipping, block her from Communications with other nations, and introduce a deadly ...
Speer, Flora
(1933-2024) US author of romantic fictions, mostly nonfantastic, almost all published in the last decade of the twentieth century. Her first work of sf interest, the loose Dulan's Planet sequence of Planetary Romance tales beginning with Destiny's Lovers (1990), presents a set of love stories and intrigues connected through Dulan's Planet, so-named after the archivist who long before (see Time Abyss) had ...
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 ...