SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 12 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Ryan, G H
(? -? ) UK author of Fifteen Months in the Moon, Giving a Full Description of its Inhabitants: Their Appearance: Customs: Laws: Modes of Locomotion: Animals: Plants, etc (1880) whose narrator, who has gained the power of Telekinesis, travels to the Moon, where he finds an Alien civilization boasting advanced forms of ...
Moskowitz, Dorothy
(1940- ) US singer-songwriter, best known as lead vocalist of the experimental rock band The United States of America (1967-1968). Her solo album Rising to Eternity (2023) was inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope, and is in Moskowitz's words "a free-form fantasy" about what revelations it may open up. These include the discovery of Alien life forms, a planet of constantly raining metal, and previously unknown ...
Robb, J D
Pseudonym of US author Eleanor Marie Robertson (1950- ), better known from around 1980 under her working name Nora Roberts; under that signature alone – though the Robb titles are themselves bestsellers – she may be the most popular novelist in America, with sales of more than eight million copies a year, around half a billion in all by 2023. Some of Nora Roberts's approximately 225 books are paranormal romances, and a few are ...
Torgersen, Brad R
(1974- ) US healthcare computer technician and author who, after a least one student publication at the beginning of the twenty-first century, began to release work of genre interest with "Extanastasis" in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume XXVI (anth 2010) edited by K D Wentworth. Most of his work can be described as adventure-oriented Hard SF, with stories appearing frequently ...
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 ...