SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 23 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: Ted Chiang
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 ...
Junk Head
Japanese stop-motion animated film (2017; rev 2021). Yamiken. Directed and written by Takahide Hori. Voice cast includes Takahide Hori and Atsuko Miyake. 100 minutes. Colour. / Initially released as the short film Junk Head 1 (2013), which became the first 30 minutes of the 2017 full-length film discussed here (a revised version of which was released in 2021). Junk Head 1 took four years to produce and was made entirely by the ...
Smith, Basil A
(1908-1969) UK author and Church of England clergyman; of genre interest are his five stories, unpublished during his lifetime and posthumously assembled as The Scallion Stone (coll 1980); these have been compared to the horror tales of M R James (1862-1936), with whose work he was familiar. Two feature supernatural phenomena with Horror in SF overtones. "The Scallion Stone" (August 1977 Whispers) hints at a tentacled ...
Biggle, Lloyd, Jr
(1923-2002) US author and musicologist, with a PhD in musicology from the University of Michigan on the music of the medieval Flemish composer Antoine Brumel. His interest in Music and the other Arts, perhaps watered down more than necessary in an effort to make such concerns palatable to his readers, can be detected throughout his sf, which he began to publish with "Gypped" in Galaxy for July 1956. His first novel, ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...