SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 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 ...
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
1. Film (1961). Windsor Productions/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Irwin Allen. Written by Allen and Charles Bennett. Cast includes Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling. 105 minutes. Colour. / The crew of a glass-nosed nuclear submarine has a mission to fire an atomic missile into the Van Allen belts, which have been set on fire by meteors (!) and are melting the icecaps. Despite enemy submarines, a ...
Jacobson, Howard
(1942- ) UK academic, journalist and author, active in the latter capacity from the 1970s, his first novel being Coming from Behind (1983); perhaps to the detriment of his career as an author of the literary mainstream, he was identified from the first as a comic novelist, though The Finkler Question (2010) won what was by then called the Man Booker Prize. Fortunately, in his first sf novel there are only slight evidences of dissociation ...
Parallel Worlds
A parallel world is another universe situated "alongside" our own, displaced from it along a spatial fourth Dimension (parallel worlds are often referred to in sf as "other dimensions"). Although whole universes may lie parallel in this sense, most stories focus on parallel Earths. The parallel-world idea forms a useful framework for the notion of Alternate History, and is often used in this way. Most of the "secondary ...
Super Loco, El
Mexican film (1937; vt El Superloco). P.C.E. (Producciones Cinematográficas Exito). Directed by Juan José Segura. Written by Jorge Cardeña Álvarez and Juan José Segura. Cast includes Ramón Armengod, Aurora Campuzano, Emilio Fernández, Consuelo Frank, Leopoldo "Chato" Ortín, Raúl Urquijo and Carlos Villarías. 65 minutes. Black and white. / An 80-year-old doctor shows a friend a ...
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 ...