amazed

In October of 2008, the comedian Louis CK <louisck.net> while visiting the now defunct Late Night with Conan O’Brien show launched into a rant about our attitudes toward technology. It went viral, and although NBC tends to pull down unauthorized links, you can probably find Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy (sic) <youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk> here. Since the video has been downloaded 4,067,640 times, chances are good that you may have already seen it. But if not, I commend this cogent cultural criticism to my glass-is-half-empty friends out there in Readerland. My favorite part comes when the comedian lights into all of those who complain about arduous plane trips. He reminds us exactly how marvelous flying is: “You’re sitting on a chair . . . in the sky!” As someone who lives and loves science fiction, I need to keep remembering that, for all its problems, this is as cool a future as any of those I read about back when I was a kid.
I experienced a similar moment of future shock a few days ago when the beta version of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE) <sf-encyclopedia.com> debuted. Why call it beta? The encyclopedists explain: “Our current 3.2m wordcount will probably expand to 4.2m by the time we’re done at the end of 2012. So there will be some entries missing in the beta text, and some cross-reference links that aren’t yet working. Of course, we hope that 3.2m words will be enough to occupy everyone for a while. . . .” That m stands for million, dear readers. And all of them are free!
Now that’s amazing.
You must understand that I’ve owned every version of the SFE up until now. Owned, as in paid for. I was a cheapskate back when I was starting out, so I bought only the trade paperback of the 1979 first edition edited by Peter Nicholls <sophiecunningham.com/features/alien_star_inte>, John Clute <johnclute.co.uk>, and Brian Stableford <freespace.virgin.net/diri.gini>. Alas, serious overuse caused the covers to part ways and the binding to crack, so I no longer have the remains of that book. I was happy to buy the hardcover of Clute and Nicholls’s 1993 edition, which is still here on my shelf. Later, I kept the 1995 CD version of the SFE, The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in my drive for months at a time.
Of course, the SFE is not the only science fiction encyclopedia in my library. Our little corner of literature is fortunate in its many encyclopedists. For example, there’s Brian Ash <http://sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/ash_brian>, Don D’Ammassa <dondammassa.com>, James Gunn <http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter/bio.htm>, George Mann <http://%20georgemann.wordpress.com/>, David Pringle <http://sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/pringle_david>, and Gary Westfahl <sfsite.com/gary/intro.htm>, to name but six of recent memory. Many are specialists who consider various slices of the genre, such as SF movies, or art, or themes, or movements. Some of their projects are more like coffee table books, lavishly illustrated, but rather thin on text, while others aspire to be comprehensive surveys, if not necessarily to delight the eye.  

browsing

The print versions of the SFE belonged to the latter group, as does the current incarnation. It sorts information into several broad categories: authors, themes, media, and culture. The authors and themes categories are self-explanatory; these are the entries I will probably make the most use of. But drilling down the various submenus of media and culture categories reveals the ambition of the effort here. The editors take media to mean not only TV and movies, but also comics, games, music, and radio. The infrastructure of genre culture includes our many awards and publications, fans and their organizations, ’zines and publishers. A tour of the literary scenes in countries from Albania to Yugoslavia demonstrates the ubiquity of SF.
I suppose that I am giving away one of my secrets as your columnist when I reveal that browsing the thematic entries in the print SFE has inspired many an installment in this space. As an example, read the SFE articles on alternate history <http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/alternate_history>, cyberpunk <http://%20sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/cyberpunk>, and robots <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/robots>, and then fire up the Internet Wayback Machine <archive.org> for a jaunt back through the “On the Net” archives. And I often consult these erudite surveys of our common tropes and ideas before I begin a story. As a longtime fan of the fantastic, I sometimes discover to my chagrin that what I thought was my very own brilliant new idea was in fact something I read in a Cordwainer Smith <cordwainer-smith.com> story in 1965.
The SFE has ever been distinguished by the quality of writing and the depth of scholarship. This is especially true of the author entries. The editorial team of John Clute, David Langford <ansible.co.uk>, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight <grahamsleight.com>, as well as their many contributors, are gifted prose stylists and astute critics. Here are a few excerpts from their takes on some of Asimov’s stars.
Paul Di Filippo <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/di_filippo_paul>: Writing of Paul’s novella, “A Princess of the Linear Jungle,” the encyclopedist applauds, “The deft, haunting, glad equipoise here achieved may be Di Filippo’s central ‘note’ as a writer.”
Nancy Kress <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/kress_nancy>: “In a career that has lasted so far less than three decades, Kress has traversed much of the territory of the fantastic in literature; she does not seem ready to stop.”
Robert Reed <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/reed_robert>: Writing about Bob’s Marrow series, the encyclopedist notes, “The cool architectonic delight of the overall concept, plus his unfailing capacity to focus his narrative through the lives of plausibly conceived protagonists, has brought Reed to a significantly wider readership. Given the habit of contemporary SF readers to expect a kind of brand identity from authors, Reed’s increasing fame is very welcome.”
Robert Silverberg <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/silverberg_robert>: “In the early twenty-first century, he remains one of the most imaginative and versatile writers ever to have been involved with SF.”
Connie Willis <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/willis_connie>: “In the best of Willis’s stories, as in her longer work, a steel felicity of mind and style appears effortlessly married to a copious empathy. Perhaps most memorably in the Time Travel books, she is a celebrator.”
As I type this in October, our own Sheila Williams <asimovs.com/archives.shtml> does not have an entry. So far. Recall, however, that this is the beta version and that a million words of new and revised material are yet forthcoming to complete entries toward the end of the alphabet.

caveats

As if they weren’t busy enough, the encyclopedists are also writing a companion blog to their project. In one of the first posts, they outlined their philosophy <sfencyclopedia.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/some-philo>. They intend their project to be “a coherent whole. Although no one person has written the 3m words of the SFE, we hope and believe they reflect a consistent sensibility. The group of contributors and editors are approaching the field from the same sort of perspective.” They also aspire to create “a balanced whole.” On the other hand, they acknowledge that they are not neutral. And it is from this non-neutrality that controversy may arise. Because these writers care passionately about the history and the future of science fiction, they freely mix the objective and the subjective. For example, you may find that they do not think as highly of some of your favorite writers as you do. Unlike, say, the dry science fiction entries in Wikipedia <wikipedia.org>, the SFE can make for some lively reading!
Then there is the flaw common to all encyclopedias, and that is that they are out-of-date the moment they fall under the light of readers’ eyes. And the SFE is no exception. You will search in vain for entries about some important new (although really, not that new) writers like Aliette de Bodard <http://aliettedebodard.com>, Will McIntosh <willmcintosh.net>, Tim Pratt <timpratt.org>, and Mary Robinette Kowal <maryrobinettekowal.com>. It would be churlish to criticize this new enterprise for being behind the times before its time has properly begun, but the question remains: Will the SFE be updated once it passes out of beta? I posed this query on the SFE site and got an answer from John Clute. “From this point on, we expect to do a regular monthly global upload, which will include all the new titles, etc that have come to notice during the previous four weeks or so.” Wait, does that mean the plan is to update continually until the Heat Death of the Universe? Or at least, for the next twenty or thirty years? I sent my follow up and John replied, “But yes, even though we’re not a wiki, there will be nothing written permanently in stone about the SFE, it’s just that we will take responsibility for what goes in—and for how any new entry or piece of information is integrated properly into the whole. . . . Four million words (estimated completion total) and 14,000 entries and 120,000 internal links or so sounds a lot, and is, but does in fact make up a small enough entity that we should be able to keep it alive. This is the plan.” 

exit

I understand all about being too new to make the cut for the SFE; I was a lightly published twenty-eight-year-old tyro when the first edition came out, and thus did not merit a mention. However it was deeply satisfying to receive 6 3/8 inches of column space in the second. (And yes, I measured!) The Kelly entry, written in 1993, ended thus: “He stands at the verge of recognition as a major writer.”
Gulp.
Naturally the first thing I did after clicking over to the new version was to look myself <sf-encyclopedia.com/Entry/kelly_james_patrick> up and see if that prediction had come true. Writing about my involvement with the Clarion Writers Workshop <http://clarion.ucsd.edu>, the encyclopedist concludes: “In this as in his writing, he is a central part of the community of SF.” So you see, I can’t very well give an unbiased review here. All I can tell you is I’m very excited to play with our new Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
And I, for one, continue to be amazed at my good fortune to have access to this digital wonderland that is the internet.

Copyright © 2012 James Patrick Kelly