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Thursday 22 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 ...
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 ...
Smith, Eve
(? - ) UK author in whose first novel, The Waiting Rooms (2020), is set in a Near Future Dystopian world where – after an antibiotic crisis twenty years earlier marked by a sudden increase of bacterial immunity to Drugs – those over seventy are enclosed in the eponymous coercive Keeps, as because of their untreatable ...
Regnas, C
Pseudonym of UK barrister and author Charles Percy Sanger (1871-1930) – ie, Regnas backwards – whose Utopia, The Land of Nison [or "no sin"] (1906) is a Hollow Earth tale, whose protagonist, tumbling downwards into the land beneath, finds a mirror world which features minimal government, recognition of the inferiority of women (see Women in SF), and some advances in ...
De Abaitua, Matthew
(1971- ) UK editor, journalist and author born Matthew Humphreys, legally changing his surname in early adulthood; active from the end of the nineties, a period marked by contributions to journals and with the nonfantastic "Inbetween" in Disco Biscuits (anth 1999) edited by Sarah Champion. He edited film.com from 2000 to 2009. He is of sf interest for his first two novels, very loosely assembled into the Red Men sequence, connections between ...
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 ...