SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 24 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 ...
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 ...
Smith, Dick
(1922-2014) US visual effects expert active from the 1950s through the 1990s in both films and Television in various genres; he is of particular importance for Horror and sf projects. Pursuing a career in make-up after US Army service during World War Two, Smith spent several years trying to break into Cinema before beginning work in the late 1950s for the newer medium ...
Benson, Robert Hugh
(1871-1914) UK author; third son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson (1829-1896), and brother of the fantasy and horror authors A C Benson and E F Benson, the latter remaining by far the best-known of the three. Benson was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1895 but converted to Catholicism in 1902 and was ordained as a priest in 1904. His fiction, unsurprisingly, is composed with a convert's intensity, ...
Salterberg, B J
(1934- ) US author of The Outlander: Captivity (1989), the powerful first volume of a trilogy that seems unlikely now to be completed. In a Ruined Earth environment, a matriarchal society attempts to survive assaults from a nearby patriarchal society based on agonistic martial behaviour. Interestingly, in its treatment of men under their control, the matriarchy mirrors "normal" male prejudices against women. The clear ...
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 ...