SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 18 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 ...
Krol, Torsten
(? - ) Australian author, whose reclusiveness has led to unconfirmed speculations that Torsten Krol is a pseudonym. His first novel, The Dolphin People (2006) skirts the fantastic in its depiction of the extreme behaviour of a German family (including at least one war criminal) whose plane has crashed in the Amazonian jungle just after World War Two, and who must convince the tribe that discovers them that ...
Droids
German 1970s electro-disco group. Their album Star Peace (1978) contains eight science-fictional songs that attempt, in unauthorized and unembarrassed fashion (most obviously in the opening track "Can You Feel the Force?"), to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977), from whose popularization of the term Droid the band's name was derived. [AR]
Swycaffer, Jefferson P
(1956- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "At the Sign of the Brass Breast" (in Swords Against Darkness IV, anth 1979, edited by Andrew J Offutt), though in his full length work he focused almost exclusively of Ties, including the Concordat sequence, beginning with Not in our Stars (1984) and ending with The Praesidium of Archive (1985), ...
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 ...