SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 15 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 ...
Hawkey, Raymond
(1930-2010) UK graphic designer and author whose work on several newspapers from the 1950s on led to his co-designing The Independent in 1986; his book covers include several for Kingsley Amis, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming. He is less prominent as a writer, though his President trilogy – Wild Card (1974; rev 1988) with Roger ...
Laney, Francis T
(1914-1958) US fan, author, critic and Fanzine publisher whose publication of greatest genre significance was The Acolyte (14 issues 1942-1946), an Amateur Magazine centred on H P Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. A resulting spinoff was Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937): A Tentative Bibliography (1943 ...
Pheby, Alex
(1970- ) UK academic and author whose first novel, Grace (2009), carries an escaped mental patient into a mysterious forest [for Into the Woods see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], where an old woman and a young girl dwell. His second and third novels adhere with some stringency to nonfantastic renderings of extreme states, though it could be argued that Playthings ...
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 ...