Imagine, if you will, a reader who wants to learn something about the publication history of a book they’re reading, or have just purchased, or one that is being considered for purchase. (Maybe they are reviewing the book, or perhaps they’re interested in finding a cheaper used version online.) In the old-timey pre-internet days, there was no way to do this (unless you knew folks in publishing). Happily, a modern reader—at least a modern reader of science fiction, fantasy, and affiliated genres—can turn to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB).
As you may have guessed from the name, the ISFDB is a database focusing on speculative fiction, one that can be accessed via the internet. It is a remarkable resource to which I turn daily.
The ISFDB’s roots can be found in USENET, a now archaic decentralized worldwide distributed discussion system intended to be sufficiently robust enough that in the event of a global thermonuclear war, surviving users would still be able to exchange angry barbs about the latest Robert A. Heinlein novel even as deadly fallout collected in deep drifts around the furious posters. By its nature, however, USENET posts tend to be ephemeral.1 Thus, in the mid-1990s, Al von Ruff and the entity known as Ahasuerus created the web-based ISFDB.
Compared to, say, Wikipedia or the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, the ISFDB’s presentation may seem spartan. However, where SFE can be whimsical in topic selection and Wikipedia is obsessed with notability (hahaha)2, the ISFDB aims for comprehensiveness. While one hundred percent coverage of speculative fiction is likely impossible given the rate at which new works come out, the ISFDB does its best. Click on an entry for an author and find some lean biographic information, pennames, awards, novels, and short works, accompanied in many cases by their non-genre work as well. Individual works have their editions listed, with bibliographic details like publisher and cover art. Search for a publisher, and one can find lists of their output, organized by year.
To give some idea just how much information can be found at the ISFDB, some current stats are as follows: Authors listed: 216,901. Publications listed: 670695, comprised of 440,409 novels, 30,774 anthologies, 47,819 collections, 57854 magazines, 21,156 works of nonfiction, as well as other categories. The site also tracks nearly 90 awards, from major awards like the Hugo and Nebula, down to comparatively obscure awards like the Balrog, the Gandalf, and the Dragon. Those stats change on a daily basis; a small army of volunteers works diligently to keep up with speculative fiction and its affiliated genres.
Consequently, whenever I have a bibliographic question about an author3 or a work, ISFDB is my first stop.4 Occasionally one stumbles across something so obscure that not even the ISFDB has an entry … but the odds are that if the ISFDB has overlooked it, so has every competing source. In fact, I am so spoiled by the ISFDB that when I need to find similarly detailed data for non-genre works, I sometimes find myself momentarily angry that the field in question has a hole where a database comparable to the ISFDB5 should be (or that the analogous database is less informative than the ISFDB).
So, here’s to the ISFDB, your one-stop source of information bibliographical! At least for works speculative fictional.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]For example, good luck finding much evidence that soc.history.what-if ever existed.
[2]Whatever notability is, it’s something I apparently had more of than University of Waterloo’s Nobel Laureate Donna Strickland, because her original (pre-Nobel) Wikipedia entry was deleted, whereas mine survived two attempts to delete it. I guess interminable cat anecdotes are more notable than materially advancing the field of physics while female.
[3]Without the ISFDB, I'd never have learned that I was once published in Interzone: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?147664
[4]I keep an ISFDB tab open during meetings of my book club, because I have found out the hard way that other members type searches faster than I can.
[5]Stop, You’re Killing Me! (http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/) tries something similar for mysteries, but it is an order of magnitude smaller than ISFDB. I would not be horribly surprised to discover that romance has a similar database. Mainstream fiction, however, seems to be poorly documented online, at least to the degree offered by the ISFDB. I would be happy to be corrected on this point.
“USENET posts tend to be ephemeral”
And thank Deity for that. No one needs to know what I was posting 30 years ago when I was in my 20’s.
ISFDB’s roots go back much further than USENET. Back around 1965/65, some people at MIT compiled a database of every story published by every SF author, at least as far as US publication went, and I think some UK publication. Every time there was a new entry, a punchcard could be added to the stack. People could send $2.00 to MIT to get a print copy. Admittedly, the current system is much more convenient.
I miss USENET circa 1992-1993 when I was on it. I spent so, so much time in alt.music.rush and rec.arts.tv.mst3k. And of course, at the height of the demon’s power came alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.
ISFDB looks incredible and I can’t wait to dig through it.
In my college library at SUNY New Paltz, there was a multivolume (perhaps, 20 volumes) encyclopedia that covered every major science fiction work and many minor ones. I remember reading a multipage article on Eando Binder’s Adam Link stories.
Back in the day I used to use a publication called “Books in Print” to find out what was out there.
It would give the librarians a deep thrill when someone asked for it, because they knew that they had a true reader in front of them.
@5/grs: I was bibliographer and book purchaser when I was in law school 30+ years ago and regularly used Books in Print. It was a wonderful resource.
And don’t forget ISFDB is international too – check out the German, French, Italian, Dutch… entries of original works and translations. To me as a collector it’s an invaluable source for tracking Dutch editions I don’t yet have.
@@.-@: The title of the treatise/encyclopedia I mentioned above is Survey of Science Fiction Literature (in five volumes not twenty). Though, I don’t think it has been updated since it was first published in 1979.
My big three resources for genre-related background are the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Wikipedia and ISFDB. While ISFDB doesn’t have as much “color commentary,” its factual information is superb.
I’m listed, so clearly their standards are very low.
@0: I am fascinated that you never knew you’d been printed in Interzone; I would have thought they would have been more careful. I found out when co-editing a Mack Reynolds collection that he never knew his first sale had been printed — but he had been paid for it and thought the magazine had died before it got to his story, so it’s not as if he didn’t know his work was to have been used. But ISFDB is indeed wonderful.
@2:
@2: citation? I was around the MITSFS for most of the 1970’s, and was aware of two sets of indexes: the MITSFS catalog (“Pinkdex”, after Marilyn “Fuzzy Pink” Wisowaty (later Niven)), which was in fact on punch cards for expandability but covered only books (and only those owned by MITSFS), and fixed printed indexes, of which 1951-1965 was done by sometime MITSFS member Erwin S. Strauss (aka “Filthy Pierre”, as he is sometimes still seen at conventions). The $2 version may have been a short-term fundraiser for the hardcover 15-year version. According to legend the hardcopy had some dropouts due to a dropped box of cards, but I never found out whether this was truer than (e.g.) the streetcar welded to its tracks — MIT tended to spawn legends.
@various: IME, Books in Print relied too much on publishers’ claim-staking; e.g., Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks (which I coveted and highly recommend) could not actually be ordered for some decades even thought it was listed ~continuously.
It was just a big communications screw up and I happened not to have looked at the issues involved.
I use isfdb well nigh constantly, and I have for years. I read columns about it all the time.
So far, it’s been very reliable.
My two published short stories are in there.
But I discovered that one of my favorite series as a child, Paul R. Fisher’s THE ASH STAFF trilogy, is not. That is disconcerting. I have wondered for years what happened to Fisher. The three books of his I read impressed me deeply. All I know about him is that he wrote four books at a young age.
Even more important in some ways than the author and general bibliographic info – ISFDB also has a fairly good record of cover art and artists. Including where their art has been used on multiple books.
So when you see a cover that reminds you of something, you can go and see who the artist is, and that can help find that book you vaguely remember.
@11: Specifics not immediately to hand, but a couple of editorials by Fred Pohl in IF or Galaxy at the time.
@10: I’m also listed – very low standards…
James: There’s a SHWI version here https://soc.history.what-if.narkive.com
I use ISFDB all the time! I recognize myself in much that you describe in your essay.
There are two things where ISFDB could (and should) improve:
1. Electronic editions. With the rise of (self-published) ebooks I’ve noticed that more and more often, these editions are missing. I maintain a huge spreadsheet of my books and stories and I note the original year publication, for which the ISFDB is my go-to resource. Lately, I’ve noticed quite a few works that had first been published as ebooks that the ISFDB seems to be unaware of. And some works that are only available that way are missing completely.
2. It would be great if there were a way to report errors. The quality of ISFDB’s data is excellent but it is not error-free.
For example, a couple of days ago tor.com reprinted the story The Angel of Khan el-Khalili by P. Djèlí Clark. The ISFDB has an entry for this story but it is misspelled – it reads el-Kalili instead of el-Khalili. (It also doesn’t yet list the tor.com reprint but this is probably because it happened so recently.)
Moreover, that story is not listed as being part of the universe of Clark’s other Steampunk Cairo stories.
I’d like to signal this to the folks at ISFDB but that doesn’t seem to be possible. (I guess I could try to sign up but I already spend too much time editing entries as a Goodreads librarian.) A simple message function to suggest corrections shouldn’t be difficult to implement and I think that the ISFDB would benefit.
I use it along with several other source to compile my contributions to the daily Birthday listings at File770.com. It’s not perfect as it has a tendency to include stuff that’s clearly not genre, but it is quite useful.
apparently wikipedia’s argument was “notability doesn’t trump copyright, so copy-and-pasting Donna Strickland’s official bio from the website of the organization she runs is not acceptable, please try again”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donna_Strickland/Archive_1#A_selected_timeline_of_the_edit_history_of_this_article
(and then nobody bothered to try again. If you say “why didn’t somebody”, that raises the question of, well, why didn’t you?)
This must be why I could not find a wikipedia article for the first female physicist I thought of, Lise Meitner
In some ways, isfdb goes back to the day when artificial stupidity was in its infancy. Type in “n k jemisin” and it has no idea what you’re looking for. –supergee
@14 What’s this then? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?25111
@22:
Try just jemisin http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?111330
Yeah, the search function does very poorly with names that have initials in them. Unless the author has a somewhat less common name (like Jemisin), you’re almost always better off searching for a title and working backwards.
I just checked, and a friend of mine’s first two books are there, as is, for some strange reason, a link to the website I made for him.
I had forgotten that I had made that website almost 20 years ago, only just learning how to make websites.
N.B.I tried to use USENET and soc.history.what-if in particular, but it was too complicated at the late ’90 / early ?whatevers.
@22 & 25:
Concerning authors with initials, you need to type them correctly.
The thing with isfdb is that it will not forgive any misspellings and that includes additional or missing characters in a string of characters.
Therefore, as initials are properly used with a dot behind the letter and a space between them, isfdb will return the entry for N. K. Jemisin even if you only search for “n. k. j” but not if you search for “n k jemisin”. You omitted the dots which is what screwed up your search, whereas truncation is not a problem.
That said, isfdb actually includes a variety of spelling variants if applicable, sometimes even renderings in Cyrillic script or Japanese / Chinese!
(For example, it will yield a search result for Stivn King -because the database knows this Yugoslavian edition-, as well as Стивън Кинг andスティーヴン・キング; it will not, however, yield results for the common misspelling Steven King or for Stephen E. King -which would be correct since Mr. King’s middle name is Edwin- because he has never used it publishing. )
ISFDB is my go-to for information and links to post, but it should be noted that WorldCat (dot org) is a very worthy site and may exceed ISFDB in usefulness for library information and non-genre books.
Two other free, community-curated bibliographic resources I use often are FictionMags (which covers popular fiction that was published in periodicals) and the Grand Comics Database (covering comic books). Both include some science fiction and fantasy, so there’s some overlap with ISFDB, but they cover other genres as well. I’m grateful to the folks who maintain them!
For general fiction, particularly the order of mystery series, Good Reads (https://www.goodreads.com/) is my usual source. Now, if only they wouldn’t continually invite me to link to my (non-existent) Facebook page.
*sheepishly waving a LibraryThing flag over here to support another non-commercially linked database*
I find LibraryThing generally has the best scans of book covers.
Is the site only in English? How do you search for other languages?
Joining the “love ISFDB” chorus . . .
@29:
The FictionMags Index (general fiction periodicals index) may be found at: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/FMI/0start.htm
Grand Comic Database: https://www.comics.org/
——-
For the student or scholar may I recommend the _Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Database_ (https://www.comics.org/) originally created by Texas A&M U (now retired) Curator of the Cushing Library’s Science Fiction Research Collection, and kept up-to-date by him and a small team of librarian/archivist-bibliographers. SFFRD indexes scholarly, popular, and some fan-published materials (books, book articles, magazine articles, dissertations & theses, and web-based materials) about science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural, and utopian/dystopian fiction and media materials, currently listing more than 126,000 items.
/s/ Your friendly (retired) academic librarian . . .
@34: Don’t know what happened, but the *real* URL for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Database is: https://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/site/
/s/ embarassed librarian . . .
I’d like to recommend also the single biggest database in Spanish of speculative fiction, called “Tercera Fundacion” (Third Foundation): https://tercerafundacion.net/
It’s extremely comprehensive too, and there are lots of entries for Spanish language publications and authors that are not to be found (yet) on the ISFDB (for example, there are many books missing in the ISFDB from Carlos Gardini, one of Argentina’s most important sff authors and translators)
@33: The site’s interface is in English only.
It lists foreign language editions. You can see this, for example, on their page for Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The foreign language editions are far from complete. Often it lists just one or two editions whereas the English language editions are much more exhaustive.
Also, it doesn’t list all translations in all languages. Wikipedia lists translations into over 60 languages where ISFDB only shows 9.
Lastly, ISFDB covers some languages better than others. The German language editions are not complete but more often than not if a German translation exists, ISFDB lists it.
So, you see that the database isn’t at all perfect when it comes to foreign language editions but it is much, much better than nothing! Especially considering that the quality of those (few) entries is very high.
Interesting news: the ISFDB got a special award at the most recent WorldCon.