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Saturday 19 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.
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
From the Drain
Film (1967). Produced by David Cronenberg and Stefan Nosko. Directed and written by Cronenberg. Cast comprises Stefan Nosko and Mort Ritts. 14 minutes. Colour. / Two men are in a bathtub. The first (Ritts, who starred in David Cronenberg's first student film, Transfer [1966]) is sat at the plughole-end of the bath and proceeds to ask a series of insinuating and ...
Gouvieux, Marc
Pseudonym of French military pilot and author Marc Edmond de Lafargue (? -? ), used for a Future War novel, Haut les ailes! Carnet de route d'un officier aviateur pendant la guerre de 19– (1914; trans Bernard Miall as With Wings Outspread: A Romance of the War of 1920 1915): presumably because the book was written (and perhaps released) before World War One ...
Infodump
An item of sf Terminology commonly used to designate chunks of technical discourse inserted into fictional texts, usually texts described as Hard SF, which are based (or claim to be based) on non-fantasized understandings of Technology and science. It is therefore often safe to assume that the infodump itself, certainly in the hard sf context, is a condensation of non-fantasized knowledge, and that it is ...
Captain Flash
US Comic (1954-1955). Sterling Comics Inc. Four issues. Artists include Mort Meskin and Mike Sekowsky. 36 pages, with four long strips (three featuring Captain Flash and one Tomboy) and a two page text piece – usually fiction, but in #2 a nonfiction piece on the problems of Rocket-powered Space Flight. / #1 opens with Superhero Captain Flash ...
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 ...