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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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Synaesthesia
Item of Terminology relating to Perception, which in normal use denotes association or cross-referencing between the senses, so that (to take a commonplace example) the colour orange may evoke the smell of oranges. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was particularly fond of such metaphorical sense-associations. In the nonfantastic crime novel Opening Night (1951; vt Night at the Vulcan) by Ngaio ...
Alice in Borderland
Japanese Anime OVA series and live action Netflix Television series based on the Manga Alice in Borderland by Haro Aso, whose original title was Imawa no Kuni no Alice. / 1. Japanese Original Video Animation (2014-2015). Silver Link, Connect. Directed by Hideki Tachibana. Written by Ryōsuke Nakamura. Voice cast includes Yoshimasa Hosoya, Maaya ...
Means, Howard
(? - ) US author of an Alternate History tale, C.S.A.: Confederate States of America (1998), set in the Near Future of a world in which the Confederacy (most implausibly) won the American Civil War. The premise of this alternate timeline is a surprisingly literal application of apartheid between entirely separate but equal Black and white sectors of society, with CSA ...
Whiting, Sydney
(1820/1821-1875) UK barrister, poet and author whose Memoirs of a Stomach: Written by Himself, That All Who Eat May Read (1853; rev 1853; further rev 1855) as by "The Minister of the Interior", though seemingly spoofish, articulates issues of the relationship between imperial mind and digestive body in mid-nineteenth-century terms. Of more sf interest is Heliondé; Or, Adventures in the Sun (1854; rev 1855), whose protagonist, conveniently ...
Lewis, D B Wyndham
(1891-1969) UK journalist, anthologist and author; his first given name, Llewellyn, was changed to Dominic in 1921, apparently to mark his conversion to Catholicism (there seems to be no record of his having earlier been known as Leg Before Wicket Lewis). In active service for almost the whole of World War One, he became active as a writer only in 1919, when he took over the fledgling "By the Way" column in the London Daily Express under the ...
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 ...