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.
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 ...
Ukraine
Any account of Ukrainian Fantastika must distinguish between works written in Ukraine and works written in Ukrainian, a Venn diagram of contending linguistic and political forces. These include a sub-genre of "emigre" fiction, written in Germany, France, Canada and the United States up until the 1960s, works written in what is now the geographic territory of Ukraine, ...
Société des Timides à la Parade des Oiseaux, La
French neo-prog band, whose post-punk, whimsically aggressive and pretentious music has much of the flavour of New Wave sf. Their first album was the anagrammatically eponymous, La STOP (1990; the group's name translates as "the shy society at the bird parade"), a work which tries perhaps too earnestly to derange conventional musical styles. But Expériences De Survie (2000; the title means "Survival Experiments") very effectively ...
Frith, Henry
(1840-1917) Irish-born civil engineer, translator and author, in England from early adulthood; mostly known for his translations from the French, at least six being of novels by Jules Verne, beginning with Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (trans 1876). He is credited with a short story of sf interest, "The Balloon of the Future" (May 1885 Cassell's Family Magazine) (see Balloons), and an adaptation, which may ...
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 ...