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
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
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 ...
Gopčević, Spiridion
(1855-1928) Austro-Hungarian journalist, travel-writer and astronomer who sometimes wrote as by Leo Brenner, and who first came to notice with his purportedly first-hand account of a Western Balkan tradition of female-to-male cross-dressing, those who lived in this fashion being known as Tobelija; in Oberalbanien und seine Liga (1881), he depicts the phenomenon in ways which no Gender theorist would today find remotely palatable. He is of modest sf ...
Lost World, The
1. Film (1925). First National. Directed by Harry O Hoyt. Script by Marion Fairfax, based on The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle. Cast includes Wallace Beery, Lloyd Hughes, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone. 9700ft (approx 105 minutes, cut to 60 minutes). Black and white, with some tinted sequences. / Wallace Beery makes an unlikely Professor Challenger in this slow-moving, wordy (a large number of dialogue frames) silent ...
Hotston, Stewart
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Haecceity" in La Femme (anth 2014) edited by Ian Whates. His sf series, the Oligarchy sequence beginning with A Family War (2016), is set in a high-Technology Dystopian fairly-distant Near Future ruled by an arrogant ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...