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 ...
Sobol, Ken
(1938-2010) US author and screenwriter, in Canada from 1974 onwards. Sobol is probably best known for his numerous scripts for animated and live-action Television programmes. These include contributions to the short animated feature A Cosmic Christmas (1977) for Nelvana/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a fable in which a boy encounters three visitors from outer space who seek the meaning of Christmas; Sobol's book adaptation is ...
O'Guilin, Peadar
Working name of Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín (1968- ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "Charly's Ark" in Albedo One for Summer 1994; much of his short work was assembled as Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories (coll 2014). O'Guilin's first series, the Young Adult Bone World Trilogy beginning with The Inferior (2007), is located in what ...
Shand, Daniel
(1989- ) Scottish teacher and author in whose first novel, Fallow (2016), two brothers embark on a hegira through Scotland, with a picaresque shaping to the tale that evokes the supernatural. He is of sf interest for his third novel, Model Citizens (2022), set in a Near Future world where the growing stresses facing Homo sapiens are, perhaps, solved by the issuing/creating of ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...