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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Space [game]
Videogame (1979). EduWare Services (EW). Designed by Steven Pederson, Sherwin Steffin. Platforms: AppleII. / Space was the first science-fictional Computer Role Playing Game to be made available commercially. The game was very much influenced by Traveller (1977), to the extent that both it and its sequel were removed from sale in 1982 following a lawsuit by Game ...
Wilson, William
(circa 1826-1886) UK poet, publisher and author whose book of criticism, A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject: With the Story of the Poet-Lover (coll 1851), is of interest (see Definitions of SF). In Chapter X, "Science-Fiction – R H Horne's Poor Artist – Notice of the Same ...", he discusses R H Horne's lightly fictionalized discourse on Art, ...
Golden Gryphon Press
US Small Press publisher based in Urbana, Illinois, and founded in 1997 by Jim Turner after he left Arkham House the previous year. In its fourteen years of existence Golden Gryphon published sixty-two hardcover titles, with very occasional trade paperback reprint editions. After Turner's death in 1999 his brother Gary Turner took over as publisher and, with Marty ...
King, Ron
(? - ) US teacher and author, the protagonist of whose Young Adult tale, The Quantum July (2007), makes the Discovery of a capacity to shift between Parallel Worlds, and uses his ability to look for a reality in which his parents have not separated. [JC]
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 ...