Internet Speculative Fiction Database
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a database of bibliographic information on science fiction and related genres such as fantasy fiction and horror fiction. It is widely viewed as an authoritative source of information, and is constantly being updated.
History
Although it is an extensive collection of references, it is by no means exhaustive. It compilers estimate, as of 2003, that whilst they have most science-fiction authors on the database, they probably have only listed a fraction of the novels and short stories written.
The ISFDB was created by Al von Ruff in 1995.
After years of being hosted at www.sfsite.com/isfdb/, ISP problems forced it to be taken off-line in 2003. Soon afterwards, Texas A&M University responded by providing hosting for the ISFDB at a new address, www.isfdb.org.
The data of the ISFDB is an OSI Certified Open Source, licensed under the OpenContent License. However, the OpenContent License appears not to be compatible with the GFDL used in some other online information sources, restricting the ISFDB to being used only as a reference rather than copied wholesale into other databases.
Contents
The ISFDB contains:
- Author bibliographies
- Publication bibliographies
- Award listings
- Magazine content listings
- Anthology and collection content listings
- Yearly fiction indexes
- Forthcoming books
- Numerical statistics of data contained in the database
- Graphed statistics of data contained in the database
- A discussion board
As of 27th March 2004 the ISFDB contains data on 27362 authors, 26743 awards and 132850 titles (including 33397 novels and 62039 unique pieces of short fiction).
Compare with these other online sources:
- the Locus Index to Science Fiction
- the Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index
External link
- The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (http://www.isfdb.org)