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.
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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 ...
Sem-Sandberg, Steve
(1958- ) Norwegian-born journalist, translator and author, in Sweden from childhood; his first two novels – Sländornas värld ["The World of Dragonflies"] (1976), an ironized Space Opera whose protagonist must persuade inhabitants of a colonized planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) to return to the cold embrace of Terra, and the similar ...
Mashina Vremeni
Russian rock band (the name means Time Machine) founded by Andrei Makarevich (1953- ) and Aleksandr Kutikov (1952- ). Mashina Vremeni are, by all accounts, extremely popular in their homeland although little known outside it; and their music works within an attractively Beatle-y or "Adult Oriented Rock" idiom. Amongst their many releases is the concept album Malenkiy printz (1979), an adaptation ...
Videodrome
Film (1982). Filmplan International/Guardian Trust/Canadian Film Development Corp. Written and directed by David Cronenberg. Cast includes Les Carlson, Peter Dvorsky, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits and James Woods. 89 minutes. Colour. / Bravely placing his outrageous exploitation movie squarely in the centre of media-theorists' debates about interaction between viewer and screen, Cronenberg here produces perhaps the best (and also the oddest) of his ...
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 ...