SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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 16 March 2026
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Dietz, William C
(1945-2026) US author who began to publish sf with War World (1986; vt Galactic Bounty 1997), the first volume of his Sam McCade sequence of sf adventures about an interstellar bounty hunter, which continued with Imperial Bounty (1988) and two further titles. The galactic venue of the series exhibits some interesting kinks, and McCade himself gradually gains individuality. Although the angle of approach differs – the protagonist this time ...
Mercier, Lewis Page
(1820-1875) UK minister, schoolmaster and translator, signing as Mercier Lewis and Louis Mercier; it has been surmised that a combination of career and financial difficulties forced him into the translation trade, and these pressures plus ill health may explain the occasional shoddiness of (and frequent cuts to) his translations of Jules Verne novels; the frequency with which they were reprinted remains anomalous. The degree to which his translations were ...
Sakai, Stan
(1953- ) US Comic-strip artist and writer, born in Kyoto, Japan, raised in Hawaii, and now based in Pasadena, California, known for keeping the anthropomorphic funny-animal tradition alive in the twenty-first Century by telling tales of a wandering, masterless samurai rabbit in seventeenth-century Japan. That series, Usagi Yojimbo, has the distinction of being the longest-running comic-book series by a single writer/artist, with no ...
Matango
Japanese film (1963; vt Attack of the Mushroom People; vt Fungus of Terror). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura, based on William Hope Hodgson's story "The Voice in the Night" (November 1907 Blue Book Magazine). Special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Cast includes Hiroshi Koizumi, Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, ...
Janin, Jules
(1804-1874) French author, active from the 1820s, who first came to prominence for L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée (1829; trans Terry Hale as The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman 1993), a very early example of what would become known as the conte cruel [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In its counterintuitive lightheartedness – the plot of the tale is ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...