SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 16 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 14 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 ...
L'Engle, Madeleine
Working name of US actress, author and playwright Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918-2007), whose first play, 18 Washington Square, South (1944), was produced in 1940, and who performed on the stage during the early 1940s. Her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), and some of its successors are non-genre fictions for adult audiences, but from And Both Were Young (1949) most of her sixty or more books were for children; her later work was significant in the ...
Dirty Pair
Japanese animated tv series (1985). Based on the stories by Haruka Takachiho. Nippon Sunrise. Directed by Norio Kashima and Toshifumi Takizawa. Writers include Toshiki Inoue, Toshimichi Okawa and Michiru Shimada. Voice cast includes Saeko Shimazu and Kyouko Tonguu. 26 25-minute episodes. Colour. / The Lovely Angels are Kei (Tonguu) and Yuri (Shimazu), highly trained Trouble Consultants for the galaxy-wide Worlds Welfare ...
Ginsburg, Mirra
(1909-2000) Russian-born editor, author and translator, long resident in the USA. She began translating work of genre interest with a version of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Fatal Eggs" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for December 1964, and later translated an abridged version of his Master i Margarita as The Master and Margarita (1967). Other translations include a collection of stories by ...
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 ...