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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Nesvadba, Josef
(1926-2005) Czech psychiatrist, doctor and author, who began his literary career with dramatic sketches but soon turned to detective stories and satirical sf, continuing the tradition of Karel Čapek. One of the best Czech sf writers (see Czech and Slovak SF) – though he wrote less after the late 1960s – and aside from Čapek the best known in the West, Nesvadba created ...
Stark, Harriet
(1868-1944) US author in whose moral tale, The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of Today (1900), a lady is infected with a beauty-enhancing bacillus (see Biology). Her character – as dramatized through the diary she keeps – subsequently deteriorates, and she dies. [JC/PN]
Millhauser, Steven
(1943- ) US academic and author, with Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs from 1988 until 2017, an upstate New York demesne never precisely named but central to his work. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), earned him critical acclaim and established the uneasy relationship between reality and the fantastic that underpins all of his best work. The story of a precocious writer who ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...