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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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Maurois, André
Initially the pseudonym of prolific French man of letters and author Émile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog (1885-1967), who took the name from a village he visited during active service in World War One; in 1947 he took it as his legal name. He was best known outside of France for his romantic biographies and other nonfiction, though his first work, "La dernière histoire du monde" ["The Final History of the World"] (1903) as by Émile Herzog, was sf ...
Heterocosm
According to Brian Stableford, a term apparently first used in a sense relevant to the study of the literatures of the fantastic by Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), to distinguish between the primary universe created by God and the secondary universes created by mortals. Any difference between the two – difference being understood as inevitable – could be described as heterocosmic; and every work of imagination was therefore a heterocosm. ...
Cross, Victoria
Pseudonym of India-born UK author Annie Sophie Cory (1868-1952) – also known as Vivian Cross; she was the sister of Adela Florence Nicolson (1875-1904) who wrote as Laurence Hope; early in her career, she was briefly notorious for The Woman Who Didn't (1895), written in response to Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895). Her only known sf is Martha Brown, M.P.: A Girl of To-morrow (1935), which depicts relationships ...
Dawe, W Carlton
(1865-1935) Australian author, in UK from 1892, mostly of detective thrillers; of sf interest is The Golden Lake; Or, the Marvelous History of a Journey Through the Great Lone Land of Australia (1890), a Lost Race tale set in Western Australia, the current native inhabitants of which reflect wanly (see Devolution; Race in SF) the civilization of their Chinese (or possibly Lemurian) ...
Lyons, Edgar Albion
(1897-1980) US author of The Chosen Race: A Novel Based on the Depression and the Machine Age (1936), a twenty-first-century Dystopia governed by technocrats who impose a clockwork uniformity on the world. [JC]
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 ...