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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 ...
Zamiatin, Yevgeny
(1884-1937) Russian author who graduated in naval engineering from St Petersburg Polytechnical Institute; his studies were interrupted by participation in the 1905 Revolution as a Bolshevik, prison and deportation (a sentence which was renewed 1911-1913). He began writing in 1908, withdrew from active politics, lectured at the Polytechnic Institute until his emigration, ran foul of the Tsarist censor in 1914, and built icebreakers in the UK 1916-1917. / Zamiatin wrote about forty volumes of ...
Charyn, Jerome
(1937- ) US author who was born and educated in New York, which city he gradually transformed in his fiction into a Magic-Realist venue whose mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover (see Equipoise) at the edge of generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated New York of writers like John Crowley, Mark ...
Rossi, Veronica
(1973- ) Brazilian-born author, in US from early adulthood, whose Under the Never Sky (2012) is a Young Adult Dystopia; the young protagonist, exiled from the city Keep where she was born, must survive in the Ruined Earth environment outside. Fortunately she meets a young man, and they help each other. [JC]
Skyrack
UK Fanzine (1959-1971) edited by Ron Bennett, which was Britain's principal and indispensable Newszine throughout the 1960s. There were 96 issues in all, stencil-duplicated in UK quarto format, typically 4pp; #1 was dated April 1959 and #96 was dated July 1971, there having been a long gap since the penultimate #95 in May 1968. The title masthead used from #2 onward was lettered by Eddie ...
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 ...