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Friday 23 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 ...
Brookfield, Arthur Montagu
(1853-1940) UK politician, in Parliament 1885-1902; of his several novels, Simiocracy: A Fragment from Future History (1884) is an sf tale of some interest for its explicit (though negative) assertion of a fictional similitude between colonized peoples and a cultivated society of orang-utans from Borneo (see Apes as Human; Evolution). After their delegates to a Near Future republican ...
Jensen, Axel
(1932-2003) Norwegian author who began writing in 1955, his early novels addressing (and succumbing to) the allure of Transcendence; Ikaros: ung mann i Sahara (1957; trans Maurice Michael as Icarus: A Young Man in the Sahara 1959) in particular evokes the fantastic. His early sf, mostly in the form of scripts for untranslated Comics, is much more free-form, and was explicitly ...
Trancers
Film (1984; vt Future Cop). Lexyn/Empire. Produced and directed by Charles Band. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo. Cast includes Helen Hunt, Michael Stefani and Tim Thomerson. 76 minutes. Colour. / Band apparently learned from his early, mostly bad movies, for this small film is confident, stylish sf. Future cop Jack Deth (Thomerson) travels back from 2247 CE to present-day Los Angeles in search of dangerous mystic Whistler (Stefani), who ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...