SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Moore, Raylyn
(1928-2005) US author, born Raylyn Perrey, who began publishing with "Death is a Woman" for Esquire in 1954. She was married to Ward Moore. Her one novel of genre interest is What Happened to Emily Goode after the Great Exhibition (1978), the Great Exhibition of 1876 being in Philadelphia, which the protagonist visits by Time Travel. [JC/DRL]
Def-Con 4
Film (1985). Salter Street International Films/New World Pictures. Produced by Michael Donovan, Paul Donovan, and Maura O'Connell. Directed by Paul Donovan and Tony Randel (uncredited). Written by Paul Donovan. Cast includes Maury Chaykin, Tim Choate, Kevin King, Kate Lynch, John Walsch and Lenore Zann. 88 minutes. Colour. / Set in the Near Future, this film features a Space Station armed with nuclear missiles, ...
Clagett, John
(1916-2013) US naval officer during World War Two, diplomat, teacher/professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and author whose first sf novel, A World Unknown (1975), is of some interest for its portrayal of an Alternate-History USA dominated by a Latin civilization that has never been influenced by Christianity – Jesus Christ having never existed. In The Orange R (1978), mutants known as ...
Lebow, Richard Ned
(1941- ) French-born political scientist, in US from infancy, prolific in his field for many years; he is of sf interest for two recent volumes. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010) is a sustained analysis of Alternate History narratives, which he calls Counterfactuals, a term perhaps too easily understood to imply that historical facts are safely ...
Woolf, Alex
(1964- ) UK author, much of whose work has comprised popular nonfiction about a wide range of historical and contemporary issues; most of his fiction has appeared in series, invariably for children or Young Adult readers. Some are of direct sf interest. The Chronosphere sequence beginning with Time Out of Time (2012) revolves around the complications attending use of the eponymous central device, 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 ...