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 ...
Defiance [game]
Videogame (2013). Trion Worlds. Platforms: PS3, Win, XB360. / The Television series Defiance (2013-current) is set on a near future Earth which has been transformed into an alien frontier. In the programme's backstory a civilization made up of diverse alien species arrives from another star, looking for a new home after the destruction of their own solar system. (The most prominent writer for the show, Rockne ...
Kohda, Claire
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, Woman, Eating (2022), sophisticatedly examines the dilemmas – social, sexual (see Sex), philosophical – that must be faced by a Vampire in the contemporary world. The protagonist of the tale, whose father is Japanese and mother half-British half-Malaysian, seems well placed both to be impacted by her condition (see ...
Colebatch, Hal
(1945-2019) Australian lawyer, the third son of the Australian politician Sir Hal Colebatch (1872-1953), and author of much nonfiction written from a conservative point of view. His career as a fiction writer was long restricted to the contribution of various Ties to Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars Shared World enterprise, beginning with "The Colonels' Tiger" in Man-Kzin Wars VII (anth ...
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 ...