SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 24 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 ...
London
As the City at the heart of the British Empire (see Imperialism), London was long seen by UK speculative authors as bearing the brunt of whatever Disaster the future might bring. There are many proleptic post-imperial visions of London destroyed or depopulated, as in William Delisle Hay's ...
VanderMeer, Ann
(1957- ) US editor, who co-founded The Sterling Web in 1989, continuing to edit the magazine after its name change to The Silver Web until it ceased publication in January 2002. She also founded and edited Buzzcity Press, one of whose titles was Dradin, in Love (1996) by Jeff VanderMeer; they married in 2002. She became fiction editor of Weird Tales in 2007, and editor-in-chief ...
Koestler, Arthur
(1905-1983) Hungarian-born linguist – he wrote in four languages – journalist, playwright and author. An early Zionist, he began publishing in Tel Aviv in 1925, but abandoned Zionism and left the Middle East by 1929; as a Jewish Communist in Berlin in the early 1930s, he was clearly at risk; he later narrowly avoided execution in the Spanish Civil War, but was admitted to the UK in 1937, becoming a naturalized UK citizen in 1948. / All Koestler's books after the famous ...
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 ...