Progress

All being well, our web team at STEEL should be putting live some changes on the SFE site in the next day or two. This won’t make any amendments to the text – our first batch of text changes is currently slated for next week. It should, however, fix a couple of prominent technical issues, especially around search problems. Please comment below if you run into any site issues, especially after Tuesday.

Apps and such

I’ve had a number of enquiries through various channels about whether we’ll make the SFE available as an app for mobile platforms. The answer is that we would like to, but that finishing the SFE text and getting the website working properly has to be our priority. So this is probably off somewhere in next year rather than this year. And, to be clear, we’d almost certainly have to charge for apps (unlike the website, which would remain free.) But with those provisos, here’s a small poll to ascertain demand, and which platforms our readers use. Comments also welcome, of course.

Edge detector

Via Adam Roberts, I’ve just discovered Jez Winship’s long response to the SFE launch. Since it’s very positive, obviously I like it – even encyclopedists are human – but he raises an interesting point:

I’ve already noticed that there is no entry for Jeff Vandermeer, or for the New Weird, the cross-generic hybrid form which he helped to coin and to promulgate.

As I’ve said, we’re partway through the work of updating, with many authors in the last chunk of the alphabet not yet added (like Jeff VanderMeer – and, for that matter, Ann VanderMeer, whose work is equally relevant here.) Frankly, though, there’s a problem here. In the nearly-20-years since the last edition, the edges of “science fiction” have become much more blurred. That’s not to deny there aren’t still core writers like, say, John Scalzi. But a movement like New Weird, as I understand it, is at least partly about problematising genre expectations. Which is, from one point of view, just what art should do – mess with expectations, push boundaries, and so on. But it’s a pain in the neck for encyclopedists, who have to make a binary decision: is this something that we have to cover as “science fiction”? Much the same applies to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books which, though they may have sf-nal justifications, are a very long way from what most people would think of as sf.

In the past, we’ve erred on the side of inclusiveness. So, for instance, the entry on Karen Joy Fowler includes discussion of her great novel Sarah Canary. It’s a book that’s entirely open to readings of it as a first contact story – but also to readings that see nothing fantastic at all about it. My point, more generally, is that these cases are becoming increasingly frequent. If China Miéville hadn’t published this year, in Embassytown, a novel that was clearly sf, we’d have some of the same problems about whether he should be included. Going back further, we cover H.P. Lovecraft, though not many people would think of him as primarily an sf writer.

As with other things in the SFE, I’d suggest that the theme entries like Fabulation are really important here – both in defining where we’re coming from and trying to describe the field. But there’s no denying that the term “science fiction” is getting far more interestingly complicated – which, as I say, is good for everything except encyclopedists’ blood pressure.

The morning after

Ploughing through the many many emails I have this morning, it seems the reaction to the SFE has been overwhelmingly positive. Many thanks for your support, everyone. However, it might be worth noting some known issues that have come up:

1. Entirely legitimately, the first thing many people will have done with the SFE is to go and check if they have an entry themselves, and if so, what it says. Some people will have run into the fact that, as previously flagged, the text we’ve launched isn’t yet complete. In particular, authors with names in the last quarter or so of the alphabet are unlikely to have updated entries. This will be fixed over the course of the next year or so.
2. If you do have an updated entry, you’ll be able to tell instantly because it’ll have a bibliographic checklist – a new feature for the 2011 edition – at the bottom. If your entry has been updated, and you’ve caught errors in it, please email us using the contact form.
3. A couple of known issues with the website: searching terms in quotation marks doesn’t work, and the search also has problems dealing with accents. (Eg if you search “MIEVILLE” you don’t get the result for China Miéville as you should.) We’ll fix these as soon as we can.

And that’s it, at least for the moment.

So….

…the beta text has gone live – see www.sf-encyclopedia.com . Your humble correspondent is now going for a lie-down, after which he will start responding to the 5,271,009 emails that have arrived as a result.

Some philosophy

After the last couple of posts about logistics, I thought it might be worth saying a bit about more abstract issues, like the approach the SFE takes. This is very much a personal take on things – David Langford or John Clute might well put things differently. But various things – particularly the rise of Wikipedia – have made us do some thinking about what it is we offer that’s distinctive. Here’s a first go at listing what we’re trying to do.

The SFE is aiming 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. If you were crazy enough to read the whole of the SFE, it ought to reflect an argument about the shape and history of the field; and we hope that argument would start to come through even if you only read a few entries. That said, we think the overall sensibility of the SFE is pretty broad-church: you won’t often find us dismissing an author because, say, his/her political views aren’t the same as the contributor’s.
•  A balanced whole. This is really a consequence of the previous point. If we’re starting from an argument about what sf is, that ought to have an effect on what we choose to focus on. So, for instance, the length of entries is a rough index of how important we think a topic is.
•  A linked whole. The SFE’s links should lead you intelligently through the text. It’s an important aim for us that links in entries are chosen as carefully as the words themselves. The introduction to the second edition said that the theme entries for topics like space opera or aliens are the “connective tissue” of the SFE – that’s even more crucial now. John Clute has always described our approach to linking as “centripetal” – that is, continuing to refer you on to related topics within the body of the Encyclopedia. (A fun fact: every SFE entry is no more than six clicks away from every other entry; some day, we’d like to get in some snazzy visualisation tools to demonstrate navigating round the galaxy of SFE entries.)
• Transparent. It’s very important to us that individual entries are signed, so that those who’ve written them are accountable – both to us as editors and to the wider community. When we mess up, we’ll say so, and we’ll try to give credit where it’s due.
• Filtered. Wikipedia will very often have available an entry summarising the plot of a Doctor Who episode within a day or so of its broadcast. We’re not aiming for that – partly because it would duplicate what they do very well, partly because we don’t have the resources. But more importantly, we think it’s important to be able to step back and give the bigger picture. We want to locate a topic like Doctor Who in the wider context of written and tv sf, and to suggest its links to the rest of the sf world.

I would add “comprehensive” to that list but, if you’ve read my earlier entry on beta texts, you’ll know we’re not there yet. We are aiming to be, though, by end-2012. (So, for instance, one of our goals is to have an entry on everyone who’s published an English-language volume of sf – with a few exceptions such as vanity publishing.) I’d  also add here that we see our core role as being to cover English-language sf. We would very much like to broaden our coverage in future outside the Anglosphere – and Jonathan Clements’s expanded Anime coverage points in this direction.

We’re not:

• Neutral.  As hinted above under “A coherent whole”: if we’re making an argument about what’s important in sf, that’s inevitably going to involve some value judgments. I think I’ve read enough sf to be able to say (as I have) that Richard Morgan is an important author; and I suspect everyone else on the project has read more sf than me. This links back to transparency: if someone’s making a value judgment, it’s only fair that readers see who that someone is.
• Perfect. Much as we’ve all worked to avoid them, there will I’m sure be errors in the text. Of course, we want to get things right and so we will correct any errors as soon as we can. As per my previous post, the best way to flag any errors to us is via our email contact form.

Getting in touch

We’re tantalisingly close to being able to unveil the beta text of the SFE. We suspect that when we do, we’ll get a lot of feedback. Obviously, being human, we hope that most of that will be nice feedback. (I believe Robert Silverberg once said that all a writer wanted from a critic was “three thousand words of closely-argued praise”.) And if you want to send us champagne, gold bars, or large cheques, I’m sure we can find a way to facilitate that. However, inevitably, there’ll be requests that we change or fix something.

If you have feedback of any kind on the SFE, the best way to get in touch is via the email contact form here. This has the advantage of being copied to several of the editors, so whoever’s best placed to answer can do so.

Queries about the linked Gollancz SF Gateway site should not come to us, please – the Gateway should have its own feedback mechanisms which will be unveiled shortly.

As noted in the beta text post, if you think an entry ought to be in the SFE but isn’t, please for the moment don’t flag that for us. We’re almost certainly working on it already. And given that we’ll probably get most of our feedback just after we go live, please bear with us if we don’t reply instantly….