Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base


The Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base is an extremely useful resource for bibliographic data about SF.

The concept and name are modelled after IMDB. ISFDB is pretty much a one-man band; it doesn't have the broad base of support that made IMDB great.

Initially, ISFDB was hosted on a commercial ISP, but the level of traffic made it too expensive to run, so in January 2003, it was closed down. Happily, by February, it had found a new home at Texas A&M University, via the Cushing Library Of Science Fiction.

The ISFDB is based, at least in part, on The Dissembler, from Ken Mac Leod's The Star Fraction?:

"In MacLeod's The Star Fraction, a famous bit of freeware called Dissembler serves as a magical data mining tool. Reading about this compelled me to finish my tool that automatically populates the ISFDB with data gathered from Amazon.com. This has added about 1,000 new publications into the database, which represents in increase of about 2 percent. Okay, it's no Dissembler, but it does do a huge chunk of my work for me." -- <http://www.isfdb.org/whatsnew.html> 11/5/2003

See also the Internet Book List.


Tue, 20 May 2003 22:55:52 GMT Front Page Recent Changes Message Of The Day