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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 ...
Weaver, Will
Pseudonym of US teacher and author William Weller (1950- ), most of whose fiction, either for adult or Young Adult readers, is nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for the Memory Boy sequence comprising Memory Boy (2001) and The Survivors (2012), in which a Near Future planetary Disaster – rather domestically described – forces the ...
Cox, Luther
(1925-1977) US engineer, salesman and author whose sf novel is The Earth Is Mine (1968), in which a familiar Shaggy God Story version of the Origin of Man is outlined: we are the Post-Holocaust descendants of long-ago settlers from another planet. Exploration of this theory leads to UFO contact and a visit to the other world. [DRL/JC]
Birch, A G
(1883-1972) US author whose sole known work of genre interest was the novella "The Moon Terror", serialized in Weird Tales for May and June 1923. As the title story it filled most of the early sf Anthology The Moon Terror (anth 1927) edited anonymously, presumably by the Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. This has led to some bibliographic confusion since the front ...
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 ...