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 ...
Bryant, Dorothy
(1930-2017) US teacher, playwright and author, who also gave her name as D M Bryant in the original version of her Feminist Utopia The Comforter: A Mystical Fantasy (1971; vt The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You 1976). The narrative itself hovers Equipoisally between something like the "real" world, where it is possible that a radically dream-dominated society might survive on an ...
Schafer, Steve
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Border (2017), is a non-fantastic Young-Adult thriller set along the Mexican-American border; he is of sf interest for his second novel, eMortal (2024), whose brilliant young-adult protagonist upcodes an AI-powered Android into something like Superman. He is also ...
Guerrier, Simon
(1976- ) UK scriptwriter and author, mostly of material in the Doctor Who universe, including his first story of genre interest, "Libra: The Switching" in Short Trips: Zodiac (anth 2002) edited by Jacqueline Rayner; his Doctor Who novels include Doctor Who: The Time Travellers (2005) and Doctor Who: The Pirate Loop (2007). Some of his anthologies are of ...
Frazar, Douglas
(1836-1896) US soldier and author whose Perseverance Island; Or, the Robinson Crusoe of the Nineteenth Century (1885) is a Robinsonade. After sailing to the South Pacific, in order to establish a Utopia there with his fellows, William Anderson is trapped alone on a desert Island between 1865 and 1880, when he is rescued. During his sojourn he discovers, and kills, a prehistoric sea serpent ...
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 ...