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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 ...
Martyn, Wyndham
Pseudonym of UK author William Henry Martin Hosken (1874-1963), in the US from 20 July 1904, having travelled as Wyndham Martyn, just before he began publishing fiction in American magazines, sometimes also as W H G Wyndham Martin, Croydon Heath, or William Grenvil. He seems to have written (and may have lived as) Wyndham Martyn from an early date; and although the record of his death gives Grenvil W Martyn, there is no evidence he ever legally changed his birth name. He was the first cousin of ...
Topping, Keith
(1963- ) UK author, journalist and broadcaster whose fiction output of sf interest consists of ties to the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Doctor Who: The Devil Goblins from Neptune (1997) with Martin Day. His nonfiction, besides collaborations with Day and Paul Cornell, includes the ...
Fire in the Sky
Film (1993). Paramount. Directed by Robert Lieberman, screenplay Tracy Torme based on The Walton Experience by Travis Walton. Cast includes James Garner, Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer and D B Sweeney. 109 minutes. Colour. / Based on a supposedly nonfictional account of the abduction by Aliens of one member of a six-man forest-clearing team in Arizona, the film concentrates on local suspicions that the other five may have murdered him, and the ...
Wheldon, David
(1950- ) UK physician and author whose first novel, The Viaduct (1983), is typical of his work in general through its treatment of our Perceptions of reality as essentially indeterminable; for the released prisoner at the heart of this tale, the eponymous viaduct insecurely serves as a kind of threshold, perhaps into another Dimension. The Course of Instruction (1984) entangles its ...
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 ...