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Tuesday 20 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 ...
Intelligence
Intelligence is necessarily one of the issues discussed in the entries on Aliens, Anti-Intellectualism in SF, Cybernetics, Mutants and Superman. Machine intelligence is discussed under Computers and Robots; for amplification of human ...
Roemer, Kenneth M
(1945- ) US academic and author whose works of sf interest have focused on Utopias, beginning with The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 (1976), which remains perhaps the most sophisticated reading of utopian literature in America in the decade after the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). the essays in ...
Schroeder, Karl
(1962- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Pools of Air" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott, collecting some of his short fiction in The Engine of Recall (coll 2005). The Claus Effect (coll 1997) with David Nickle is a surprisingly savage Satire on the ...
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 ...