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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.
Site updated on 13 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 ...
Fisher, Vardis
(1895-1968) US author, raised in a Mormon family; his best-known single novel, Children of God (1939), is about the Mormons. His Testament of Man sequence covers the whole of human history, extending into many volumes the basic strategy which shapes several novels by F Britten Austin, the six volumes of Johannes V Jensen's The Long Journey (1922-1924) and other early-twentieth-century ...
Jack Armstrong
US Serial Film (1947). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Wallace Fox. Story treatment George H Plympton. Screenplay by Lewis Clay, Royal Cole, Arthur Hoerl, and Leslie Swabacker. Cast includes Joe Brown, Jr, John Hart, Jack Ingram, Claire James, Rosemary La Planche, Charles Middleton (uncredited), Wheeler Oakman, Eddie Parker, Hugh Prosser, and Pierre Watkin. 15 episodes totalling 440 minutes. Black and white. / This serial was based on the long-running ...
Satō Haruo
(1892-1964) Japanese author and poet, very much part of the mainstream literary establishment, remembered in sf terms for an early experiment in Dystopia and fantasies that prefigured those of dedicated genre authors such as Jūza Unno. Satō was only sixteen when his first work was published, a poem in the literary magazine Myōjō. He soon attained celebrity as a poet and occasional ...
Lester, Colin
(? - ) UK editor and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with a review in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction #10 for June 1976; he coedited the Forum feature in the next issue, #11/#12 dated March 1977. He is of greatest sf interest for the ambitious but short-lived project The International Science Fiction Yearbook, intended as an annual summation of the sf genre ...
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 ...