SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
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 ...
Harington, Donald
(1935-2009) US author, artist and teacher of art history, all of whose novels after the first are set in or otherwise linked to the fictional town of Stay More in his birth state of Arkansas; elements of Fantastika appear in several books of this quirky Ozarks sequence. Some Other Place. The Right Place (1972) involves Reincarnation and the use of regression through Hypnosis to ...
Robertson, Tim
(1944- ) UK-born Australian actor and screenwriter whose Mary Shelley: (A Smoked Opera for the Quick and the Dead) (1983) is a script of sf interest (see Mary Shelley). [JC]
Weiner, Andrew
(1949-2019) UK-born psychologist and author, in Canada after 1973, who began publishing sf with "Empire of the Sun" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) edited by Harlan Ellison, but who became significantly active only in the early 1980s, with thirty stories released in that decade. About half of his work was assembled in Distant Signals, and Other Stories (coll 1989), "Distant Signals" (May/June 1984 ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...