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Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
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Light Novel
Term popularized in Japan for pocket-sized Pulp works of Young Adult fiction, often mistaken for a literary genre. "Light" was originally a statement not of content, but of literal weight, with publishers commonly splitting up larger novels into two- and three-volume chapbooks in order to aid the train-commuting reader. In this regard, the format bears a distant relationship to the "railway novels" once sold in ...
Thole, Karel
Working name of Dutch illustrator Carolus Adrianus Maria Thole (1914-2000), long resident in Milan. After artistic training in Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum's State Drawing School, Thole worked in the Netherlands until 1958, when he and his family moved to Milan, Italy. There he began painting book covers for the Italian publishers Mondadori and Rizzoli, and by the 1970s, he was regarded as a dominant figure in European sf illustration, largely due to his widely admired covers for the Italian ...
Dorn, Michael
(1952- ) US actor – in various Star Trek series and one film, and elsewhere – and author of an sf novel, Time Blender (1997) with Hilary Hemingway and Jeffry P Lindsay, whose title accurately describes the consequences of an archaeologist's discovery of a time portal (see Timeslip) in which various epochs come ...
Zajac, Gord
(? - ) Canadian screenwriter and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Second Skin" in Challenging Destiny for May 1997. In his gonzo Military SF novel, Major Kamage (2010), set two decades after an unspecified War, an unreconciled veteran of the conflict, and his disbanded cohort, must save the soft ...
Long, Jeff
(1951- ) US author, initially of mountaineering novels, who made his genre debut with The Descent (1999). While including some mountaineering, this Horror thriller posits that the myth of Hell derives from a worldwide realm of Underground caverns inhabited by a Lost Race of "hadals". The hostile environment has caused many of these human-related cannibals to ...
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 ...