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
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
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 ...
O'Brien, Willis H
(1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the Cinema industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A one-minute home movie of an animated caveman and Dinosaur, involving 960 separate exposures, led to the producer and exhibitor Herman Wobber (1880-1965) advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy ...
Anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of the genus Homo, especially its species H. sapiens. Physical anthropology deals with the history of H. sapiens and its immediate evolutionary precursors (some of which in fact coexisted with H. sapiens); cultural anthropology (ethnology) deals with the contemporary diversity of human cultures (see also Sociology). The founding fathers of the science – Sir Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and Sir ...
Dollens, Morris Scott
(1920-1994) US artist – also as Morris Dollens, Maurice S Dollens and M S Dollens – who produced early work for Fanzines and began professional SF Magazine appearances in the late 1950s with one-off covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (November 1957), Venture Science Fiction (May 1958) and Fantastic ...
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 ...