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
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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 ...
Locus
US Semiprozine (1968-current), edited by Charles N Brown (calling himself Charlie Brown in earlier days) until his death shortly after working on issue #582 (July 2009); further editorial staff provided support in the twenty-first century, with Jennifer A Hall and Kirsten Gong-Wong sharing credit for Locus's Hugo wins in 2003 and 2004, and Kirsten Gong-Wong and Liza Groen Trombi from 2006; Trombi has been ...
Tobias, Michael
(1951- ) US ecologist, filmmaker, mountaineer and author, identified with environmental concerns from the time of the publication of his first book, Dhaulagirideon (1973), a lightly fictionalized study of mountains and mountaineering which was followed by Deva (1982), a novel with the same focus; neither book was literally fantastic, though the rough-hewn Gaia-infused landscape-mysticism of both inspire expansions of ...
Genetic Engineering
In his remarkable prophetic essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) J B S Haldane looked forward optimistically to a day when biologists have "invented" a new species of alga to solve the world's food problem, and in which "ectogenetic" children born from artificial wombs can be strategically modified by Eugenic selection. Nothing was known in 1924 about the biochemistry of genetics, so Haldane spoke mainly in ...
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 ...