The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction |
When will the long-awaited third edition appear?
Read all about it on our publisher's official SF Encyclopedia web page!
What will the publication format be?
Since the second edition was very nearly too large for a commercial book (the text had to be cut savagely during final editing), it seems inescapable that the third edition will have to be published on line, with regular updating. It may be possible to provide CD/DVD-ROM snapshots of the full text at any given date.
What will the on-line edition look like?
We don't know! The final look and feel will depend on discussions with website designers. At present we are using a simple temporary design for the working text used by (and accessibly only to) our editors and contributors. This can be seen in the Encyclopedia website's sample entries for the recently deceased.
Which Encyclopedia is this anyway?
A long-running project that began with The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979; vt The Science Fiction Encyclopedia 1979 US) with Peter Nicholls as General Editor and John Clute as Associate Editor; this won a Hugo Award as best nonfiction. The second edition, coedited by Clute and Nicholls, was The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993; rev 1995; further rev vt Grolier Science Fiction: The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 1995 CD-ROM; further rev 1999); it won Hugo and Locus awards.
It is not directly connected with Donald H Tuck's The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (1974-1983 3vols), a monumental work which though invaluable to all subsequent researchers is more a collection of bibliographies than a cross-referenced encyclopedia. Also unconnected are various laudable coffee-table volumes about the science fiction genre which have been misnamed as encyclopedias, usually at their publishers' insistence. These include Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1977), Robert P Holdstock's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) and John Clute's Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995).