SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 20 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Interplanetary Revolution
Russian animated silent short film (1924; original title Mezhplanetnaya Revolyutsiya). State Tech Kino. Loosely based on Aelita (1922) by Alexei Tolstoy. Directed and written by Nikolay Khodataev, Zenon Komissarenko and Youry Merkulov. 8 minutes. Black and white. / We are informed what we are about to see is "an event very likely to happen in 1929" (see Near Future), a ...
Logsdon, Syd
(1947- ) US teacher and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "To Go Not Gently" in Galaxy for June 1978 (see also below). His first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a Planetary Romance whose inhabitants, two generations after their Starship has been stranded, have created two contrasting societies on the planet: a "stationary" order governed by the ...
Palmer, Bernard
(1914-1998) US author of several series for children and the Young Adult market, all specifically designed to impart Christian values. Of sf interest is the Pat Collins/Jim Dunlap sequence, comprising a series of tales starring Pat Collins, most of which were revised and retitled about a decade later and starring Jim Dunlap; the first of these is Pat Collins and the Peculiar Dr Brockton (1957 rev vt ...
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 ...