SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 23 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
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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 ...
Wilson, Colin
(1931-2013) UK author of speculative works, who remains best known for his first book, The Outsider (1956), in which he gave graphic expression to the brilliant autodidactism, the erratic system-building mentality, the tendency to treat himself (and a previous few others) as a natural elite, and the voracity for new mental sensations that would mark the very numerous titles he would produce over the next several decades, many of them of direct or indirect interest to sf and ...
Lane, Jane
Pseudonym of UK author Elaine Kidner Dakers (1905-1978), author under her own name of a biography, Titus Oates (1949), and author of many esteemed historical novels under as by Lane. Her Post-Holocaust sf novel, A State of Mind (1964), is set in an Orwell-like totalitarian Dystopia, an England where both god and monarchy have been banned. [JC]
Monkey Business
Film (1952). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Howard Hawks. Written by Ben Hecht, I A L Diamond, Charles Lederer. Cast includes Charles Coburn, Cary Grant, Hugh Marlowe, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers. 97 minutes. Black and white. / Made only a year after The Thing (though his direction of the latter was uncredited), Hawks's second sf film is one of the classic screwball comedies. Grant plays a staid ...
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 ...