Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Last updated
ISFDB: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Type of site
 Online database
Headquarters
United States
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerAl von Ruff
Key people
  • Al von Ruff
  • Ahasuerus
URL isfdb.org OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
CommercialNo
Registration
  • None to view
  • Required to edit
Launched8 September 1995;28 years ago (1995-09-08)
Current status2,002,324 story titles from 232,816 authors (April 2022) [1]
Written in

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction, including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and horror fiction. The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with the database being open for moderated editing and user contributions, and a wiki that allows the database editors to coordinate with each other. As of April 2022, the site had catalogued 2,002,324 story titles from 232,816 authors.

Contents

The code for the site has been used in books and tutorials as examples of database schema and organizing content. The ISFDB database and code are available under Creative Commons licensing. The site won the Wooden Rocket Award in the Best Directory Site category in 2005.

Purpose

The ISFDB database indexes speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history) authors, novels, short fiction, essays, publishers, awards, and magazines in print, electronic, and audio formats. [2] [3] It supports author pseudonyms, series, and cover art plus interior illustration credits, which are combined into integrated author, artist, and publisher bibliographies with brief biographical data. An ongoing effort is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database, with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100 percent.

History

Several speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from 1984 to 1994 by Jerry Boyajian, Gregory J. E. Rawlins and John Wenn. A more or less standard bibliographic format was developed for these postings. [4] Many of these bibliographies can still be found at The Linköping Science Fiction Archive. [5] In 1993, a searchable database of awards information was developed by Al von Ruff. [4] In 1994, John R. R. Leavitt created the Speculative Fiction Clearing House (SFCH). In late 1994, he asked for help in displaying awards information, and von Ruff offered his database tools. Leavitt declined, because he wanted code that could interact with other aspects of the site. In 1995, Al von Ruff and "Ahasuerus" (a prolific contributor to rec.arts.sf.written) started to construct the ISFDB, based on experience with the SFCH and the bibliographic format finalized by John Wenn. The first version of ISFDB went live on 8 September 1995, and a URL was published in January 1996. [4] [6] [7]

The ISFDB was first located at an ISP in Champaign Illinois, but it suffered from constrained resources in disk space and database support, which limited its growth. [4] In October 1997 the ISFDB moved to SF Site, a major SF portal and review site. [3] [4] Due to the rising costs of remaining with SF Site, the ISFDB moved to its own domain in December 2002, but it was shut down by the hosting ISP due to high resource usage. [8] [9] In February 2003, it began to be hosted by The Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University. [8] [10] The ISFDB moved to a commercial hosting service in 2008. [11]

On 27 February 2005, the database and the underlying code became available under Creative Commons licensing. [4] [12] [13]

ISFDB was originally edited by a limited number of people, principally Al von Ruff and Ahasuerus. [14] [15] Editing was opened in 2006 to the general public on an open content basis, with changed content being approved by one of a limited number of moderators in an attempt to protect the accuracy of the database. [16]

In late 2022, the ISFDB was publicly criticized for its refusal to update its record of an author's name after a name change. The record remained uncorrected for more than a year, with an ISFDB editor deploying transphobic talking points at one point, [17] in spite of the fact that maintaining a trans author's deadname violates best practices and recommendations from various professional organizations. [18] [19]

Awards and reception

In 1998, Cory Doctorow wrote in Science Fiction Age that "[T]he best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains the Internet Speculative Fiction Database". [3] In April 2009, Zenkat wrote that "it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet". [20] ISFDB was the winner of the 2005 Wooden Rocket Award in the Best Directory Site category. [21]

Ken Irwin reviewed the site for Reference Reviews in 2006, praising "the scalable level of detail available for particular authors and titles" while also pointing out "usability improvements" needed at that time. He concludes by calling it "a tremendous asset to researchers and fans of speculative fiction", stating that no other online bibliographies have "the breadth, depth, and sophistication of this database". [22] On Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll described the site as "the single best [SFF] bibliographical resource there is". [23] Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, described the site as an "indispensable [source] of information in putting this project together", [24] and the site was described as "invaluable" by Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann in their book, Science Fiction and Climate Change. [25] The Chicon 8 committee gave a special committee award to ISFDB during their opening ceremonies on 1 September 2022. [26]

As a real-world example of a non-trivial database, the schema and MySQL files from ISFDB have been used in a number of tutorials. Schema and data from the site were used throughout Chapter 9 of the book Rails For Java Developers. [27] It was also used in a series of tutorials by Lucid Imagination on Solr, an enterprise search platform. [28]

As of September 2013, Quantcast estimates that ISFDB is visited by over 67,400 people monthly. [29] The database, as of April 2022, contains 2,002,324 unique story titles from 232,816 authors. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poul Anderson</span> American science fiction writer (1926–2001)

Poul William Anderson was an American fantasy and science fiction author who was active from the 1940s until his death in 2001. Anderson also wrote historical novels. His awards include seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Wynne Jones</span> British childrens fantasy writer (1934–2011)

Diana Wynne Jones was a British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy and speculative fiction novels for children and young adults. Although usually described as fantasy, some of her work also incorporates science fiction themes and elements of realism. Jones's work often explores themes of time travel and parallel or multiple universes. Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series, the three Moving Castle novels, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gene Wolfe</span> American SF and fantasy writer (1931–2019)

Gene Rodman Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He was a prolific short story writer and novelist, and won many literary awards. Wolfe has been called "the Melville of science fiction", and was honored as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Haldeman</span> American science fiction writer (born 1943)

Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Connie Willis</span> American science fiction writer

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis, commonly known as Connie Willis, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear (2010). She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Wolverton</span> American speculative fiction writer (1957–2022)

John David Wolverton, better known by his pen names Dave Wolverton and David Farland, was an American author, editor, and instructor of online writing workshops and groups. He wrote in several genres but was known best for his science fiction and fantasy works. Books in his Runelords series hit the New York Times bestsellers list.

Edward Lewis Ferman is an American science fiction and fantasy editor and magazine publisher, known best as the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Gaughan</span> American science fiction artist (1930–1985)

John Brian Francis "Jack" Gaughan, pronounced like 'gone', was an American science fiction artist and illustrator and multiple winner of the Hugo Award in the category of Best Professional Artist.

Betty Ballantine was an American publisher, editor, and writer. She was born during the Raj to a British colonial family. After her marriage to Ian Ballantine in 1939, she moved to New York where they created Bantam Books in 1945 and established Ballantine Books in 1952. They became freelance publishers in the 1970s. Their son, Richard, was an author and journalist specializing in cycling topics.

John F. Moore is an American engineer and a writer of fantasy and science fiction primarily under the short name John Moore.

Sheila Finch is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. She is best known for her sequence of stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gavin Grant (editor)</span>

Gavin J. Grant is a science fiction editor and writer. He runs Small Beer Press along with his wife Kelly Link. In addition, he has been the editor of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet since 1996 and, from 2003 to 2008, was co-editor of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series along with Link and Ellen Datlow. Their 2004 anthology was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for best horror anthology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David H. Keller</span> American writer (1880–1966)

David Henry Keller was an American writer who worked for pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century, in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. He was also a psychiatrist and physician to shell-shocked soldiers during World War I and World War II, and his experience treating mentally ill people is evident in some of his writing, which contains references to mental disorders. He initially wrote short stories as a hobby and published his first science fiction story in Amazing Stories in 1928. He continued to work as a psychiatrist while publishing over sixty short stories in science fiction and horror genres. Technically, his stories were not well-written, but focused on the emotional aspects of imaginative situations, which was unusual for stories at the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Bowes</span> American writer

Richard "Rick" Dirrane Bowes is an American author of science fiction and fantasy.

Kathryn Elizabeth Cramer is an American science fiction writer, editor, and literary critic.

Michael Shayne Bell is an American science fiction writer, editor, and poet. He won the second quarter of the 1986 Writers of the Future contest with his story, "Jacob's Ladder". His short works have been nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. The Association for Mormon Letters awarded him for editorial excellence with his Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor anthology in 1994. Baen Books published Nicoji, a novel based on his short story of the same name, in 1991.

John Bangsund was an Australian science fiction fan in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He was a major force, with Andrew I. Porter, behind Australia winning the right to host the 1975 Aussiecon, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that convention.

<i>An Infinite Summer</i>

An Infinite Summer is the second collection of science fiction short stories by British writer Christopher Priest and the first of his books to collect stories set in the Dream Archipelago. The stories had all previously been published in various anthologies and magazines; they may be described, somewhat interchangeably, as science fiction, fantasy literature, metafiction and macabre.

Mary Soon Lee is an American speculative fiction writer and poet.

References

  1. 1 2 "ISFDB Statistics". isfdb.org. Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 18 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  2. ↑ "Link Sites". SF Site. Archived from the original on 30 June 2012. Retrieved 17 May 2009.
  3. 1 2 3 Doctorow, Cory (September 1998). "Internet Column from Science Fiction Age, September 1998". Science Fiction Age. Archived from the original on 10 July 2012. Retrieved 17 May 2009. The best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Internet Speculative Fiction Database". Onpedia. Archived from the original on 6 March 2012. Retrieved 17 May 2009.
  5. ↑ "The Linköping Science Fiction & Fantasy Archive" . Retrieved 23 July 2009.
  6. ↑ "What's New from 1995". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 18 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  7. ↑ "What's New from 1996". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 18 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  8. 1 2 "ISFDB finds new home at Texas A&M". SFWA News. Science Fiction Writers of America. 5 April 2003. Archived from the original on 11 August 2011. Retrieved 29 September 2010.
  9. ↑ "What's New from 2003 - ISFDB (Jan)". isfdb.org. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
  10. ↑ "What's New from 2003 - ISFDB (Feb)". isfdb.org. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
  11. ↑ "What's New from 2008 - ISFDB". isfdb.org. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
  12. ↑ "ISFDB:General disclaimer". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 2 August 2012. Retrieved 30 July 2009.
  13. ↑ "What's New from 2005: What's New – 27 Feb 2005". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. 27 February 2005. Archived from the original on 3 September 2012. Retrieved 30 July 2009.
  14. ↑ "Major Contributors". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 18 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  15. ↑ "Top ISFDB contributors (All Submission Types)". Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Archived from the original on 18 April 2022. Retrieved 18 April 2022.
  16. ↑ Gandalara (23 December 2006). "Changes to the ISFDB". Science Fiction Brewed Fresh Daily. Other*Worlds*Cafe. Archived from the original on 13 December 2015. Retrieved 17 May 2009.
  17. ↑ Sanford, Jason (31 December 2022). "Genre Grapevine for December 31, 2022" . Retrieved 11 January 2023.
  18. ↑ Watson, Bri(an) M.; Rawson, K.J.; Huang, Jackson (1 November 2022). "Newly Released: Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources". Descriptive Notes. Retrieved 12 January 2023.
  19. ↑ Thompson, Kelly J. (July 2016). "More Than a Name: A Content Analysis of Name Authority Records for Authors Who Self-Identify as Trans". Library Resources & Technical Services. 60 (3): 140–155. doi: 10.5860/lrts.60n3.140 . Retrieved 12 January 2023.
  20. ↑ Zenkat (14 April 2009). "Our latest mass data load: science fiction books". Archived from the original on 19 May 2012. Retrieved 12 December 2015. ...it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet.
  21. ↑ "2005 winners: Wooden Rocket Awards". SF Crowsnest. Archived from the original on 26 February 2009. Retrieved 8 February 2009. 14 Best Directory Site. Directories, online databases or search engines with a worthy SFF section. Winner: Internet Speculative Fiction Database www.isfdb.org.
  22. ↑ Irwin, Ken (October 2006). Chalcraft, Tony (ed.). "Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)" . Reference Reviews . Emerald Group Publishing. 20 (7): 30–32. doi:10.1108/09504120610691619. ISSN   0950-4125. ProQuest   862159187 . Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  23. ↑ Nicoll, James Davis (April 30, 2021). "The Single Best Bibliographical Resource There Is (if You Like SFF)". Tor.com. Archived from the original on July 14, 2022. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  24. ↑ McKee, Gabriel (January 2007). The Gospel According to Science Fiction: From The Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier. Westminster John Knox Press. p. ix. ISBN   978-0-664-22901-6.
  25. ↑ Milner, Andrew; Burgmann, J. R. (May 2020). Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press. p. 40. ISBN   978-1-789-62172-3.
  26. ↑ Glyer, Mike (1 September 2022). "First Fandom Awards and Big Heart Award Given at Chicon 8 Opening Ceremonies". Archived from the original on 4 September 2022. Retrieved 8 September 2022.
  27. ↑ Halloway, Stuart Dabbs; Gehtland, Justin (2007). "Creating and Invoking Web Services". Rails For Java Developers (PDF). p. 249. ISBN   978-0-9776166-9-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-10. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
  28. ↑ Hossman (21 January 2011). "Solr Powered ISFDB – Part #1". Lucid Imagination. Archived from the original on 1 March 2011. Retrieved 14 March 2011.
  29. ↑ "isfdb.org Monthly Uniques". Quantcast.com. Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 27 September 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.