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 ...
Zelenyj, Alexander
(? - ) Canadian author whose Black Sunshine (2005) surreally depicts a Post-Holocaust world suddenly deprived of all light, a transformation described more colouristically than, but with equivalent effect to, that found in similar Eschatological landscapes in the work of José Saramago and Robert Charles ...
Cross, Ronald Anthony
(1937-2006) US author who began publishing sf with "The Story of Three Cities" in New Worlds 6 (anth 1973) edited by Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt; the tale's steely moroseness characterizes a good deal of his work in shorter forms, much of it posthumously assembled as The Ronald Anthony Cross Science Fiction & Fantasy Megapack: 20 Great Tales (coll 2019 ebook). His first novel, ...
Mettais, Hippolyte
(1812-1881) French doctor and author whose L'An 5865 ou Paris dans 4000 Ans (1865; trans Brian Stableford as The Year 5865 2012) is a Ruins and Futurity tale whose narrator – four millennia hence, after numerous Disasters have almost totally obscured the deep past – conceives of Paris in terms of the Lost World ...
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 ...