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December, 1979
December’s Ampersand of the Month, a holiday
cornucopia, is by Jane Briggs,
a marketing major at Ohio State University.
She's $2 5 richer. We welcome inspired,
artistic Ampersands, but we sneer at
ballpoint doodles. Send examples of
your genius (black ink on white
paper, name and address clearly
printed on the artwork) to
Ampersand of the Month,
1680 N. Vine Street 8201,
Hollywood, CA 90028.
The Science Fiction
Encyclopedia
by Haul in Ei.i.ison
Every s| ec ialtv and ingroup coterie has its
bible. For physic ians it's dray's Anatomy; f or
attorneys it's Bl.ic kstone s Commentaries on
the Ijtu's of England; for tillers of the soil it’s
The Farmer's Almanac. Nut-cases who be
lieve in Atlantis have Ignatius Donnelly’s
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, and it's the
seminal lunacy pursuant to that particular
irrationality, even though its sum-aud-
substance is merely feverish bat-scratching
based on two brief mentions of "the lost
continent** in Plato’s essays “Timaeus" and
’’Critias.”
Semiliterate college students ha xc Cliff’s
.\otes; artists and photographers con
cerned with movement and the human
form have Muybridge's Human and Animal
Locomotion: (Geneticists have McKusick’s
Mendehan Inheritance in Man. Astronomers
have Flammarion, evolutionists have Dar
win, inythologists have Bullfinch and or
ganic chemists have Pauling.
But until publication date of (k toiler 5.
when Dolphin Books, a division of
Douhledav, released The Science Fiction
Encyclopedia, the clone-c hildren of Wells
and Write and Poe had nothing but unre
generate dreck as The Ultimate Source.
There have liecn fan-oriented attempts
at compiling all the biographical detritus
and arcane incunabula of the science fic
tion genre, many of them, stretc hing hac k
to the mid-Twenties when the first scien-
tifiction aficionados began cluttering in
secret conclave over their passion.
In 1952 a fan named Don Day published
the first index to the science fiction maga
zines, and it was a start. Between 1974 and
I97H an Australian fan named Donald
Tuck amassed the first Encyclopedia of Sci
ence Fiction and Fantasy but it took him so
long to get it published, and its sources
were so fogged hy their own prejudices,
that the two-volume work was about as use
ful as the knowledge that the last person to
marry a duck lived four hundred years
ago
In the last decade, to the horror of those
ol us seeking a one-volume reference work
that would unify all the history and cur
rent information, there has been a ple
thora of c rippled, spastic, hunchbacked,
astigmatic offerings purporting to lie the
answer. An Austrian named Fran/ Rot-
tenstciner who, I’m convinced, operates
without both oars in the water, did a dirty
deed tilled The Science Fiction Book in 1975.
If one accepts the view of Herr Rot-
tensteiner, there is only one acceptable sf
writer in the world, the Polish novelist
Stanislaw Lem. All the rest are merely
manques. Well, mas lx- Phil Dick is okay, but
he's prolxibly a groveling lackey ol the Im
perialist Capitalist slavemasters, too. In
1977 the Swede, Sam l.undwall, assembled
Science Fiction An Illustrated History, whic h
was f ull of old tintype's and movie stills, but
as fat as providing a ready reference, it was
possibly as exciting as watching a sep
tuagenarian prying the cotton out of a
Miclol Ixittle with a tuning folk. Jacques
Sadoul in France did Histoire de la Science
Fiction Moderne and. as licst I can tell with
my limited ability to read French, he felt
everything worthwhile was w ritten in the
genre before 1956. Colin Letter's The In
ternational SF Yearbook was expensive but
dry, nonjudgmental and diff use. laist year
Rob I loldstoc k in F.ngland did yet another
Encyclopedia of SF but it was just a cheap ex
cuse for Octopus Books to assemble more
of those banal four-color airbrush paint
ings of Brohdingnagian starships zipping
overhead a la the opening shot of Star Wars.
I won’t even describe the faceless hor
rors of lesser efforts such as the Tymn/
Schlobin Year’s Scholarship in SF (jf Fantasy
or Sieman’s SF Story Index. There are some
things (Gcxi never intended Man todiscuss.
Professor.
All of which brings me to this here now
Ixxik I'm going to suggest you rush right
out and buy at once, don't give me no lip,
wiseass.
It is called — oh the originality of it
all — The Science Fiction F.ncyclopedui, and it
costs a thumping $12.95 in the high-class,
sturdily-bound paperback edition...or a
throat-constricting, eye-watering, gorge-
lloating $24.95 in hardcover. You would no
doubt advise me that Luca Brazzi sleeps
with the fishes if I hustled you onto the
$24.95 version, so 1 won't. But you should.
It's that good. ■
Notw ithstanding the cost, let me assure
you that the book has finally been pub-
lished on science fiction. If James (Gunn's
excellent Alternate Worlds is the correct
history of sf to own, then The Science Fiction
Fncyclopedui edited by Peter Nicholls and
John Clute (and divers hands) is the only
encyclopedia to own.
t is, not to lie too wishy-washy alxiut it,
the liest goddam reference work ever as
sembled on the subject. It is very nearly
perfect; and which of us can claim the
same?
What it is, seekers of enlightenment, is a
great yawping beast of a fxxik. 672 pages
long, beginning with A-for-Aandahl,
Vance... ending with Z-for-Zulawski,
Jerry...and containing between first and
last entries over 2.H00 entries covering (as
the front flap copy puts it) science fiction
authors, themes, films, magazines, novels,
stories, illustrators, editors, critics, play
wrights, film-makers, publishers, pseudo
nyms, series, telev ision programs, original
anthologies, comics, sf in foreign coun
tries, terminology, definitions, awards,
fanzines, sf conventions, important scien
tists allied with sf, and a positronic paisnip
in a pear tree. There are over 700.000
words of text and hundreds of photosand
illustrations.
But it is hardly its cyclopean monolithic
size that commends this Ixxik to vout i apt
attention. It is the quality!
In this Age of Ineptitude, wherein the
locating of a decent auto mechanic who
won’t put the w rong plugs and points in
vout junker assumes the pro|xn lions of a
Holy Quest not unlike that of Diogenes
seeking an honest man in the streets of
Athens, lieing able- to heft a eexlifving en
terprise this adroit, this Inf tilv c rafted, this
intelligentlv produced, is a wonder beyond
describing.
Let me pick just a sample at random.
And not a sample calc ulated to prove the
argument by loading the gun; in other
words. I won't pic k one of the pet fed en
tries for Asimov or Clarke or Hemic-in or
Moorcock or Bradbury. I’ll open at ran
dom ... uh .. .here:
JAKOBKR. MARIK (1941- ). Canadian
writer whose first, most promising sf
novel. The Mind (itrds (1976), confronts a
materialist, tolerant society with a repel
lent spiritual creed on another planet.
With some subtlety the outcome is shown
to he not altogether, morally, on the side
of the liberals; various ironies take place.
SF.E ALSO: politics; religion
That “see also" is the lies! pai t of this en-
cyclopedia. The cross-referencing
includes 175 topics, ranging through Ab-
surdist SF, Alternate Worlds, Androids,
Biology, Children’s ST. Conceptual
Breakthroughs, Devolution, Eschatology.
(Gothic SF. Invasion and Magic to Meta
physics, Money. Overpopulation, Psi Pow
ers, Robots, Scientific Errors, Taboos,
Time Paradoxes, Weather Control and
Women. Almost every entry, no matter
how miniscule, has a fistf ul of alternate re-
fet rents, thus solidifving authors and
works not only in terms of themselves, but
in the greater context of the development
and history of the sf genre.
Yts, of course, there are oversights and
errors; but how could there not lie a few
creeping in. on all sixes and eights, in a
work of this scope? YUs. thev attribute the
’’shaggy gcxl” story to Michael Mcxtrccx k in
two places, rather than to Brian Aldiss,
who coined it; yes, thev omit mentioning
Philip Jose Farmer’s The Liners in Con
ceptual Breakthroughs under the topic of
sex, though they list virtually every sub
sequent reworking of Farmer's materials;
yes. they haven’t discovered the real iden
tity of the w riter who wrote in Fantastic
Universe magazine during the Fifties
A TIME OF FftE5H
DREAMS, OF
POSSIBILITIES
fCEVJLi KlSEN AS
THE PAWN/N6
DAY/
QY APP/-Y/N6
THE HARO WON
LESSONS OF
HistoRy, uje
WILL USE THE
PAST To TRANS
FORM THE FU7IAE
A NEW UTOPIA
WILL PROCLAIM
ITSELF.I