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Friday 14 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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.
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Muddock, J E Preston
(1843-1934) UK author, much travelled in early life, who published prolifically under his own name, sometimes giving his surname as Preston-Muddock (though Preston is absent from his birth records), and as by Dick Donovan; in general he restricted this pseudonym to juveniles and thrillers, including Tales of Terror (coll 1889) and The Scarlet Seal: A Tale of the Borgias (1902), the latter a witchcraft fantasy. As Muddock he published considerable nonfiction as well ...
Rogers, Lebbeus Harding
(1847-1932) US businessman and author whose The Kite Trust (A Romance of Wealth) (1900), which may have been self-published, follows the juvenile kite-inventors and founders of the eponymous compact into adulthood, enormous wealth, the discovery of new Power Sources and the construction of transatlantic tunnels (see Under the Sea), while all the while an interplanetary spirit instructs the cast on the history of ...
Godwin, Francis
(1562-1633) UK bishop and author, most noted for his striking description of a lunar Utopia in the posthumously and anonymously published The Man in the Moone: Or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger (1638). There is considerable debate over the date of composition, some suggesting it was written as early as 1588 after Godwin heard Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) lecture at Oxford, though most recent theories suggest it ...
McLaren, Colin Andrew
(1940- ) UK archival librarian, playwright and author, in Scotland from 1969. Most of his novels are Young Adult historical tales; of sf interest is Rattus Rex (1978), set in an 1860s London plagued by a sudden infestation of strangely well-disciplined Rats (for As Above So Below and Urban Fantasy see The ...
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 ...