SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 12 January 2026
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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 ...
Williams, John A
(1925-2015) US academic, poet and author, almost all of whose work reflected his experiences (including service in World War Two) as a Black American. His sf (see Race in SF) is similarly focused. The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) posits a Black genocide plot on the part of the American Government, known as the King Alfred Plan and to be put into action – beginning with mass transfer of Black people into ...
China
For a general note on this encyclopedia's handling of Chinese names, please see Editorial Practices: Chinese and Japanese Names. / Chinese literature has a long tradition of the fantastic that prepared the way for, and leads up to, modern Chinese sf. Like modernism itself, the sf genre reached China through the unexpected route of Japanese contacts, in particular the foreign studies of the author Lu ...
Jensen, Jane
(1963- ) US computer programmer, Game designer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Mother's Love" for The Scream Factory in 1991, and whose Gabriel Knight sequence – comprising Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1997) and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (1998) – are technically Ties, though they are based on her own sequence of ...
Tangerine Dream
German electronic music group, founded by Edgar Froese in 1967. Their line-up has changed a good deal over the years – Klaus Schulze was a member for a time – although as of 2007 the group comprises Froese and musician Thorsten Quaeschning (1963- ). Their first release, Electronic Meditation (1970) owes much to musique concrète, using cut-and-pasted audio tape to ...
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 ...