SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Taekoesu Yonggary
South Korean film (1967; vt Yongary, Monster from the Deep). Kuk Dong and Toei Company. Directed by Yi-Duk Kim. Written by Yi-Duk Kim and Yun-Sung Seo. Cast includes Moon Kang, Cho Kyoung-Min, Kwang Ho Lee, Sun-Jae Lee, Jeong-Im Nam and Yeong-Il Oh. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes for American release. Colour. / An astronaut is called away from his honeymoon for an emergency "reconnaissance flight" into Earth orbit to observe a nuclear test in ...
Modern Monsters
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper. Publisher: Prestige Publications. Four bimonthly issues, April 1966 to October/November 1966. Editors: Gunther Collins and Donald F Glut (uncredited). / A good-quality magazine which tried to imitate Famous Monsters of Filmland, although with a slightly more mature slant. Modern Monsters ran the ...
Morioka Hiroyuki
(1962- ) Japanese author whose first published work was "Yume no Ki ga Tsugeta nara" ["If Only the Dream Trees Could Touch"] (March 1992 S-F Magazine). His subsequent output has been dominated by a single Future History, the intricacies and achievements of which may arguably be said to have been ill-served in translation. / Morioka's chief work throughout the 1990s and 2000s was the Seikai ...
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 ...