SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 12 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 ...
Taiwan
Despite the political divide, Taiwanese sf is effectively yoked to Chinese sf by the shared language, and there is some discussion of sf in Taiwan in the entry for China. / Taiwanese authors with full entries in this encyclopedia are Chi Ta-wei and Wu Ming-Yi. Taiwanese films with entries are The Hole (1998; original title Dòng; cut vt ...
Disraeli, Benjamin
(1804-1881) UK politician and author born Benjamin D'Israeli, Conservative Member of Parliament from 1837 and – in 1868 and 1874-1880 – Prime Minister. In his almost-forgotten youthful Fantastic Voyage, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) published anonymously, the eponymous captain, who is an innocent savage from a prelapsarian (ie pre-missionary) South Seas Utopia, voyages to the land of ...
Lapin, Lawrence
(? - ) US academic and author of a medical sf thriller, Super Virus: Immortal Sins (2009), whose doctor protagonist, attempting to save his wife from breast cancer, invents a virus capable of stopping the disease while simultaneously conferring Immortality. But in the meantime he is suspected of murder. The sequence is projected to continue. [JC]
Incredible Melting Man, The
Film (1977). Quartet Productions, American International Pictures. Written and directed by William Sachs. Additional dialogue Rebecca Ross. Cast includes Michael Aldredge, Burr DeBenning, Alex Rebar and Ann Sweeny. 84 minutes. Colour. / By 1977 the idea of an astronaut returning to Earth after being contaminated by some dread space infection or irradiation was well and truly a Clichéd subgenre of ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...