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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.
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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 ...
Hanley, James
(1897-1985) Irish author, in the UK from around 1908, whose prolific output – beginning with Drift (1930) – focused on raw tales of life at sea, and upon sometimes grim novels about working-class life in Britain, a savagery of address almost certainly effected in part through his long immersion in World War One; he enlisted early, was gassed and invalidated out of the army, and returned to war work as a stoker on ships carrying ...
Modernism in SF
The advent of Modernism as a literary movement went unremarked at the time, and when that time was remains a matter of debate; for a discussion of the dating and significance of Modernism in Latin America, see that entry. Certainly a break with the realistic fiction of the Victorian era, analytical in manner and unitary in form, was evident by the 1890s in, for example, the middle work of Henry James (1843-1916) and August Strindberg (1849-1912) and in the ...
Cross, Malcolm
(? - ) UK author whose Dangerous Jade (2012) is set in an Equipoisal fantasy-themed City full of anthropomorphic Clones. Orbital Decay (2014 ebook) is a contribution to the publisher's Shared World Afterblight Chronicles series. He is also of sf interest for his contribution to the ...
Man Without a Body, The
UK film (1957). Filmplays Ltd. Directed by W Lee Wilder and Charles Saunders. Written by William Grote. Cast includes Julia Arnall, George Coulouris, Michael Golden, Robert Hutton, Sheldon Lawrence and Nadja Regin. 78 minutes. Black and white. / New York business mogul Karl Brussard (Coulouris) learns that his recent health problems – loss of memory (see Amnesia) and delusions – are due to an inoperable brain tumour. However, his doctor has ...
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 ...