SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Brown, Rosel George
(1926-1967) US author with an advanced degree in ancient Greek; for three years she worked as a welfare visitor in her native Louisiana. She began publishing stories in September 1958 with "From an Unseen Censor" for Galaxy; some of her tales were interplanetary, some more typical of "women's" fiction. A Handful of Time (coll 1963) assembles much of her early work. The Sibyl Sue Blue series – Sibyl Sue Blue (1966; vt ...
Queneau, Raymond
(1903-1976) French author, active from about 1920 and a founder member of the Oulipo movement, whose parodic (sometimes harum-scarum) poems and novels occasionally reconstruct mimetic forms into examples of Fantastika, light-heartedly. Pierrot mon Amour (1942; trans J Maclaren-Ross as Pierrot 1950) is particularly fantasticated. Of some interest is Saint Glinglin (1948; trans James ...
Technothriller
A common term, used in this encyclopedia to designate a tale which, though it often makes use of sf devices, in fact occupies an undisplaced, essentially mundane narrative world, one that – during the years when technothrillers were most popular, from the 1950s to the 1970s – was commonly seen through a Cold War lens. Though usually taking place in the present day, technothrillers may be set in the Near Future and invoke ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...