SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 15 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 ...
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 ...
Austria
Austrian literature must be considered a part of the larger German literature (see Germany), although with a distinct voice; Austrian writers have always been published more by German publishing houses than by Austrian ones. / At the turn of the century, Vienna was a veritable laboratory for many of the ideas of modern times, from psychoanalysis and logical positivism to music, the arts and literature: here were found Sigmund ...
Osunde, Eloghosa
(? - ) Nigerian film-maker, journalist and author whose short fiction has not been designatedly fantastic. They are of interest for their first novel, Vagabonds! (2022), which is set in an intoxicatedly multi-form version of Lago (see Cities), the toolkit of Fantastika being creatively here re-sorted, though the intimate assemblage of tales that make up the whole might be most ...
Ace Books
US paperback-publishing company founded by pulp-magazine publisher A A Wyn in 1953. Under editor Donald A Wollheim, Ace published a high proportion of sf, much of it in the "Ace Double" format of two titles bound together Dos-à-Dos: the first sf story to be published thus was Theodore S Drachman's Cry Plague! (1953 dos) in the volume with serial number D-13. The ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...