SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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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Crawford, Alexander
Pseudonym of UK author Alexander Lindsay (1869-1915), older brother of David Lindsay, of whose six novel-length tales (only four of which reached book form) at least two are of sf interest. His first, Kapak (1911), is a Lost Race tale in which the eponymous king of the now-hidden Incans comes to contemporary England as part of his scheme to re-establish the Empire of his predecessors; battles involving a giant ...
Teixeira, Kevin
(? - ) US author whose Near Future sf novel, A Virtual Soul (1999), follows the adventures of a Genetically Engineered Slave, victim of a Dystopian world conceived in Cyberpunk terms, as he attempts to acquire and assert a human-like Identity. ...
Dos-à-Dos
When two books are bound together so that they share one spine, but with their texts printed upside-down in respect to each other, the composite volume is described in the publishing trade as being bound dos-à-dos (literally "back-to-back"). Such a volume has two front covers and two title pages, which the reader can confirm by turning any example upside-down, revealing a second front cover, right way up, and a second text, likewise. Almost always – though not invariably – ...
Australia
Much early Australian sf falls into subgenres which can be described as sf only controversially: Lost-Race romances, Utopian novels and Near-Future Political thrillers about racial invasion (see Race in SF; Yellow Peril). / Works of utopian speculation began appearing in Australia about the middle of the ...
Temporal Adventuress
A figure of late twentieth-century Fantastika, where she stands out against the male-dominated storylines that dominated adventure fiction in general, and tales of the fantastic in particular; more recently, women adventurers tend to appear without arousing special attention. The roots of the Adventuress can be traced back to the nineteenth century, where precursors can be detected in characters like H Rider Haggard's ...
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 ...