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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.
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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 ...
Simon, Francesca
(1955- ) US-born author, in UK from early adulthood; she initially concentrated on books for younger children, like the Horrid Henry sequence beginning with Horrid Henry and the Mega-Mean Time Machine (2012), but is of more direct interest for the sharply Equipoisal Norse Gods sequence comprising Sleeping Army (2011) and The Lost Gods (2014), set in an ...
Thompson, Ray
(? - ) UK author of an Young Adult sf novel, Ayron IV (1975), whose young protagonists, roaming across the eponymous planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds), find vehicular tracks that signal an Alien presence; and so it turns it out. Lessons in Xenobiology and Ecology are ...
Rogers, Alva
(1923-1982) US author and artist, nicknamed "Red" for the colour of his hair and politics. Long involved in sf Fandom, he drew the covers for a number of 1940s Fanzines as well as some for the (UK) American Fiction series. In the 1960s he published the fanzine Bixel (4 issues September 1962-October 1968) and the one-off Bixeltype (December 1963), the latter comprising an essay ("FTL and ...
Littell, Philip
(1868-1943) US journalist, playwright and author of This Way Out (1928), a Satire replaying the story of Adam and Eve in modern dress. Woman is intrinsically more frivolous than Man, etc (see Feminism; Women in SF). [JC]
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...