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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Davies, L P
(1914-1988) UK author – in the Canaries from the mid-1970s – who also worked as a pharmacist and as a painter. His consistently borderline sf often permits a delusional-frame interpretation of the events it depicts, so that frequently it is difficult to distinguish among the genres he utilizes, which include Horror, Fantasy, suspense thriller and sf. Along with John Blackburn and John ...
Linaker, Michael R
(1940-2024) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with the Scorpion series comprising Scorpion (1981) and Scorpion: Second Generation (1982), both Horror in SF tales featuring Mutant Monster scorpions. / Of greater sf interest is the Cade sequence of Near Future police procedurals, beginning with ...
Le Lapin, Francis
Pseudonym of unidentified Belgian (? - ) editor and author whose Satirical The Secret Files of Donald J Trump sequence beginning with The Tijuana Tango (2020) is set in a Steampunk Alternate History version of 1968; among other Satirical happenings, "the spy who loved himself" is dispatched by the Russian Tsar to ...
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 ...