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    A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Ebook28 pages22 minutes

    A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

    By Rudyard Kipling

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    About this ebook

    This early work by Rudyard Kipling was originally published in 1892 and we are now republishing it as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'A Matter of Fact' is a short story about three journalists travelling by sea from Cape Town to Southampton who's voyage does not turn out quite as they may have expected. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateFeb 17, 2015
    ISBN9781473399877
    A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Author

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, but returned with his parents to England at the age of five. Among Kipling’s best-known works are The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and the poems “Mandalay” and “Gunga Din.” Kipling was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1907) and was among the youngest to have received the award. 

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      Book preview

      A Matter of Fact (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - Rudyard Kipling

      A Matter of Fact

      By Rudyard Kipling

      A Cryptofiction Classic

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      Introduction

      The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

      Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

      Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under

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