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
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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 ...
Gjærevold, Einar
(1961- ) Norwegian journalist, television and film producer and author. In 1980-1981 he published two issues of the semi-professional SF Magazine Bizarr Science Fiction/Bizarr Mortem (Ragnar Rognlien being co-editor on #2); other Fanzines of his include Epilog, Stellar Express and the one-shots Eta Carina Razzmatazz and ...
Larson, Rich
(1992- ) Nigerian author, currently in Canada, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Every So Often" (dated 2011 for untraced release; in Datafall: Collected Speculative Fiction coll 2012 ebook); Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction (coll 2018) carefully assembles a further instalment of his numerous stories. He is now perhaps best known for The Violet Wars sequence beginning with Annex ...
Twiford, William Richard
(? -? ) US author of one sf novel, Sown in the Darkness: A D 2000 (1941), which depicts the Near Future as a time of constant War and decline; the author's presumption (see Race in SF) that the white peoples of the world must arm themselves against a "rising tide of color" may have some part in the disappearance of his tale of dreadful warning, despite Twiford's ...
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 ...