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Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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Wray, A Lunar
Pseudonym of US Unitarian minister and author Minot Judson Savage (1841-1918), whose At the Back of the Moon; Or, Observations of Lunar Phases (1879), a spoofish verse Satire in which a group of touring Lunarians, after conveying to the narrator of the tale their sense of life on the Evolution of life on Earth, return to the back side of the Moon, where they inhabit a topsy-turvy world which the ...
Beaumont, Roger
(1935- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Trade-Off" as R A Beaumont in Analog for February 1973. His one sf novel, published by Robert Hale Limited, is Deep Space Processional (1982) with R Snowden Ficks, a Space Opera featuring Aliens and court intrigue in a ...
Mutants
The idea of "mutation" as a concept for use in understanding biological Evolution was popularized by Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) in Die Mutationstheorie (1901-1903); he related it to gross hereditary variations – the freakish "sports" which occasionally turn up in animal populations. Such sports are usually short-lived and sterile, and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had rejected the notion that they might play a key part; the concept of mutation as an ...
Maazel, Lorin
(1930-2014) Composer and conductor, much better known in the latter capacity, born in France to American parents and brought up in the US. Among his infrequent compositions is the opera 1984 (2005) based on Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell, with a libretto by J D McClatchy and Thomas Meehan. With a somewhat conventionally melodramatic score, it was not well received by critics, but has proved popular in revivals. [CWa]
Lawrence, C E
(1870-1940) UK editor and author, of whose several novels, most of them fantasy, two are of sf interest: The Trial of Man: An Allegorical Romance (1902) anonymous, a mildly Equipoisal tale whose protagonist travels to the Moon and subsequently to heaven where the Angel Zuron assigns him a new planet where he breeds sinlessly with a new Eve (see Adam and Eve), but then fatally boasts of his ...
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 ...