SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 18 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 14 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 ...
Holsinger, Bruce
(? - ) US academic, specializing in medieval manuscripts, and author who, after nonfiction studies like Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (2001), began publishing fiction with the John Gower sequence of fantasticated historical detections. The first volume, A Burnable Book (2014), features the historical poet John Gower (1330-1408) in a quest for a mysterious manuscript whose contents contain accurate ...
Woodhouse, Martin
(1932-2011) UK physician (non-practising), entrepreneur, screenwriter and author, whose first work of sf interest seems to have been the story "The Higher Mathematics" as M C Woodhouse for Authentic Science Fiction #46 in June 1954. More significant was his collaboration, with his brother Hugh Woodhouse, as screenwriter for twenty-two of the twenty-six scripts for the 1961 first season of the weekly Television puppet ...
Raife, Raymond
Pseudonym of an insecurely identified author, possibly Benjamin Hayward (? -? ), active from before 1900 in the magazines with most of his work 1908-1927 appearing in Boy's Own Paper (see Boys' Papers). Of sf interest are The Sheik's White Slave: Being an Account of the Unravelling of the Mysteries of the Temple of Djaramos (1895), a Lost Race tale set in North Africa, and ...
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 ...