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Roadmap: For the original discussion of Roadmap 2017 see this archived section. For the current implementation status, see What's New#Roadmap 2017.



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Archives of old discussions from the Community Portal.

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Contents

Affonso Arinhos de Melo Franco = Afonso Arinos

These [1] [2] are clearly the same person - same birthdate, deathdate, place of birth and Wikipedia EN link. Both only have a single, different, item in their bibliographies. I'm not familiar with Brazilian/Portuguese naming/publishing practices - does anyone have any opinion/preference on which should be the primary author record, and which the alternate?

Also, I note we have 3 different versions of the given name between the 2 records and the canonical/display and legal name fields: Affonso, Afonso and Alfonso. I propose to leave the display names as-is, but use "Afonso" as the legal name, as that is what Wikipedia EN and PT both have. If anyone can advise on whether "Arinos" should be grouped with the given name or the family name - as the two records split things differently at the moment - that would be helpful too. ErsatzCulture 12:46, 1 May 2022 (EDT)

More Recent Dead

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?463527; When my edit is approved, which entered all 3 dozen or so missing stories from the only place I could find with the page numbers, a JAPANESE site, could someone who owns this book check the Simon, Arnzen, Jeffrey, Gay and Ryan publication histories, which I assume are at the back because they're not at the front? Arnzen published a book of poetry in 2005 from NAKED SNAKE Press with the same title as his poem here, the Ryan story was a digital short on Amazon in 2013, and Gay's story was in online zine Guernica in 2010. The Jeffrey and Simon works I made the same date as this anthology because I can't find anywhere that says they were published elsewhere. EDIT: While searching for something completely unrelated today I found a copy of this book, uploaded Dec. 2019, hiding on Archive.org; probably why I couldn't find it earlier is because Open Library lists both the original anthology and this sequel under the same title heading. So I rejected the Japanese edit and made a new one crediting the Archive copy, but what's interesting is while I was right about the Arnzen, Ryan and Gay stories, Jeffrey's story is from Alt-Zombie (2012), which has no contents on ISFDB, while Simon's poem is from Dead Set (2010), which has contents on ISFDB but not that poem, so I assume whoever entered credits forgot or didn't have complete info. So after this is approved I'll have to fix a few dates, and then look at those other 2 anthologies and see what I can do. --Username 12:14, 2 May 2022 (EDT)

William Campbell

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?15478; The last 2 entries are for the guy who played Squire of Gothos on Star Trek; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_(actor). I don't think he's responsible for all the other stuff, but possibly those interviews aren't really supposed to be on here. Mods? --Username 00:57, 3 May 2022 (EDT)

Fixed. You really could do this on your own. But thanks! Christian Stonecreek 06:08, 3 May 2022 (EDT)
Deciding whether to completely delete non-ISFDB material wrongly entered here by other editors should be left up to moderators, not someone like me. --Username 09:45, 3 May 2022 (EDT)

Rhonda E.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2964977; Eikamp's name is correct on contents page of webzine and in her bio; should it just be corrected or is a variant really necessary? --Username 11:56, 3 May 2022 (EDT)

Wagner

https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.22068; I randomly came across the record for noted anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer Richard Wagner, and added an appropriate photo to it; however, I had no idea his works were published as books, but there they are. Funny that there's such a huge gap between the original editions and the modern ones; surely there are many more that are missing. However, the only copy on Archive.org I can find of his complete trilogy is a crusty 1910 copy from the reliable old Public Library of India; I'm sure Arthur Rackham's illustrations were beautiful but in this poorly scanned copy they all look like Rorschach tests. I thought I'd mention it here in case anyone wants to enter it. --Username 20:25, 4 May 2022 (EDT)

Basil Copper Questions

I don't usually enter page # for editions that already have them entered for another edition with the same # of pages, but in this case, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?283565, the contents were out of order so I decided to enter the #. That opened up a bunch of other issues; first, someone wrote a note saying they got the month, November, from amazon.uk, but I only see a Jan. 1 date which means they didn't know when it was published, but certain other Amazon sites have an exact date of 11-16-1978. Where they got that from is unknown because book only says 1978, so if anyone knows of a photo showing publisher's slip with exact publication date then the date can be changed. Also, the 4 original stories were never given the month so I did that, but story lengths for 3 of them them weren't entered, either. 2 of them were obvious and were fixed, but "The Treasure of Our Lady" is right on the edge between novelette and novella, being 48 pages both in hardcover and paperback, so anyone who owns a print copy could do a word count and enter whatever the right length is. "The Great Vore" is a novella (fixed by me, also) but is on ISFDB in an issue of The Urbanite which only mentions his story "The Flabby Men" on the cover; there's no way they could have fit it into such a small mag so either someone here goofed and entered it incorrectly or there's just an extract in the magazine, so if anyone knows it can be fixed. Finally, Dalby's site says 219 pages for the Hale edition, just like the St. Martin's edition, but someone entered 224 here; many people worked on it over the years, so it's hard to tell who did it, but since Hale and St. Martin's editions back then were usually exactly the same except for prices and other minutiae, I suspect it's really supposed to be 219. --Username 14:27, 5 May 2022 (EDT)

2022-05-06: Brief downtime at 11am server time

The server will be unavailable between 11am and 11:05am. A software patch to automate the process of adding ISFDB templates will be installed. Ahasuerus 10:42, 6 May 2022 (EDT)

Everything should be back up. If you come across any issues with Notes templates, please post the URL of the affected record here. Ahasuerus 11:04, 6 May 2022 (EDT)

Tem Title

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?34535; S.R. Tem's recent collection Thanatrauma has no contents entered here, but Best New Horror Vol. 31, not entered on ISFDB yet, has a story by him from that collection. While checking his online PDF bibliography there was a note that said the limited HC (only TP and E are entered here) contains an extra story, "Again, the Hit and Run", from 1981's Chrysalis 9, so I added that info to the title record, but there's no such story title, it's "Again, the Hit and Miss". Only sites that show the latter title are ISFDB and Philsp, so I assume that's where the info came from. The former title is much more common online, so I suspect it's the correct one, but there doesn't seem to be any photos of Chrysalis 9 contents online. A lot of older SF buffs on here, so I'm sure someone owns it and can verify what's the real title; problem then is how many other titles in the 10 volumes of Chrysalis may be wrong here. --Username 13:04, 6 May 2022 (EDT)

Peter Crowther Story/Collection

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2902166; Crowther published a collection with same title in 2021, not entered here; that's what the review is of, not the individual story. --Username 13:44, 6 May 2022 (EDT)

Please bring that to the attention of the PV: he might not see it here and would have to be asked anyway. Christian Stonecreek 07:31, 7 May 2022 (EDT)
Done. They've already made an edit for the collection and imported contents; that was fast. --Username 10:26, 7 May 2022 (EDT)
Haha, you're welcome. ;) PeteYoung 10:29, 7 May 2022 (EDT)

Oz Books

https://archive.org/details/@ximm?query=oz; 1916 Rinkitink edition has Reilly & Lee as publishers but note on ISFDB says they didn't appear until 1918. I'm sure some of these other books will be useful, too. This dude Ximm never had anything except cover photos whenever I came across him on the Archive, but I guess years ago he did add some actual books. --Username 14:38, 6 May 2022 (EDT)

Wikipedia dates Reilly & Britton becoming Reilly & Lee after 1918, which would put the 1916 first edition of Rinkitink as published under the original name of the firm. Happily, there are numerous bibliographies of Baum and Oz available. The Book Collector's Guide to L. Frank Baum and Oz is one such example. Unfortunately, the two scans of Rinkitink (ignoring the Gutenberg link) in the page you cite do not have enough of the book scanned to uniquely identify the printing. They aren't of the first or second printings which all have "Reilly & Britton" on the title page though there are binding variants of the 2nd with "Reilly & Lee" on the spine. Given that the color plates do not have captions, this is likely a printing from about 1919 or 1920. It could be further narrowed down by the titles listed on the verso of the ownership page, which is missing from the scans. If the verso listed titles through The Tin Woodman of Oz it would be ca. 1919. The ca. 1920 printing lists titles through Glinda of Oz. The captions with the plates were added with a variant of the ca. 1920 printing. The color plates were gradually discontinued beginning in 1932 and were completely gone by 1935. You could add an undated printing for this scan if you'd like. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 18:14, 10 May 2022 (EDT)
Holy Christ, that was a beautiful block of info. Alas, I'm not really into the whole "minor variant" thing, but if I see any books in Ximm's collection that look unique I'll try to enter them. I wrote the above info mainly because I know there are people here who like entering multiple editions of the same book and detailing all the little differences, so this looked like a trove they could use. EDIT: Something I just noticed; The New Wizard of Oz is from Bobbs-Merrill, did a search and that's the only Oz book on ISFDB by that company, but Ximm's copy seems to be the 1903 original which isn't entered here (1903 here is 2nd ed.), and the page count, 208, fits the much later editions, not the earlier ones. Also, the copyright is 1899, because the original book was titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but date here is 1900, with a long note explaining why. So there's some things to start with. --Username 19:14, 10 May 2022 (EDT)
No, the cover is not that of the first printing of the second edition (First edition with the title change to The New Wizard of Oz), that cover was first used for the fourth edition (ca. 1920), but binding cloth is wrong and the fourth edition has 259 as the last numbered page. The archive.org edition appears to be the 4th printing of the Fifth edition which was published in the mid-1930s. It is bound in light green cloth which started with the 3rd printing and it lacks a printers imprint on the copyright page which distinguishes it from the 3rd and 5th printings. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 21:30, 10 May 2022 (EDT)

Dead Lee

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?152739; Death date given as 1986 but book is 1993; also, http://www.crimefictioniv.com/Part_17A.html, which says Ann, not Anne, with a note saying they corrected her middle name. --Username 20:21, 7 May 2022 (EDT)

1992 & 1993 Hugo Awards - "Preliminary Nominees" entries

I noticed that the 1992 and 1993 Hugo data has several entries categorized as "Preliminary Nominees". I don't know if it's defined anywhere was exactly that term is supposed to mean - Schema:awards doesn't go into any detail - but I'm guessing it's for long lists and/or awards that have multiple rounds of nomination/voting, which AFAIK has never applied to the Hugos. ErsatzCulture 12:36, 9 May 2022 (EDT)

Our "Special" award levels were created to reflect the variety of scenarios that we had come across over the years. There are no exact definitions; editors just use whatever seems the closest to the nomination that they happen to be working with. Ahasuerus 18:49, 9 May 2022 (EDT)

I dug out the stats PDF for the 1993 awards, and that indicates those entries are titles that weren't finalists, but appeared on at least 5% of ballots. That implies to me that these records would be better categorized as either "Honorable Mention" (which is what they are listed as in that PDF, and which was used for the 1962 Hugos, or "Nomination Below Cutoff" (which is what has been used for the "best of the rest" records since 1995).

Thoughts? ErsatzCulture 12:36, 9 May 2022 (EDT)

If the official PDF lists them as Honorable Mentions, that's what they should be listed as here. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 13:11, 9 May 2022 (EDT)
Thanks both. Unless there are any objections raised here, I'll switch the offending records from "Preliminary Nominee" to "Honorable Mention" in a few days' time.
BTW, I see we also have a gap for these not-quite-Hugo-finalists between 2003 and 2009 inclusive. I see that the full stats for 2003 at the very least were published, so I guess I've just created a mini-project for myself to add all those in... ErsatzCulture 16:58, 11 May 2022 (EDT)

Asimov's A Problem of Numbers marked as non-genre

This story is not speculative in any way or form. After adding its original magazine, it had been marked as such. If anyone disagrees, please point me to the part that would make it speculative - I did not spot even a hint of it while reading it. :) Thanks! Annie 18:40, 9 May 2022 (EDT)

Superhorror

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?35586; Donald Grant actually Don Grant (FantLab flap photo), but that's alternate of Donald M. Grant, who didn't do cover art, so I made it Don Grant (artist); real artist Donald Grant only did French covers. Who's this mysterious Don? While doing this I noticed Gordon Grant's art credit actually belonged to Gordon Grant (artist), so I fixed that, too. --Username 19:53, 9 May 2022 (EDT)

Sometimes cover art is licensed, too, and sometimes people who normally only work in one language will do work in another. This is especially true of art, since it generally doesn't require any translation or modification. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 12:20, 10 May 2022 (EDT)

Alphabetizing secondary verifications

We are up to 14 secondary verification sources. They are not sorted on most Web pages and it can take a few seconds to find the one that you need. I propose that we alphabetize them. Ahasuerus 16:33, 10 May 2022 (EDT)

I like that idea. It will make finding them easier, especially if we add more. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 13:06, 11 May 2022 (EDT)
Right! For now the list seems sufficient, but upon adding more and more, it'll be better to have them ordered. Christian Stonecreek 13:34, 11 May 2022 (EDT)
The change has been implemented. Thanks for the comments! Ahasuerus 17:57, 13 May 2022 (EDT)

French Dark Love

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?70551; Mes amis, this, https://archive.org/details/noircommelamour0000unse, has 2000 date on p. 511 but has Albin Michel as publisher, not LGF as OL says, and the cover's gray, not green like the original edition. French contents were never entered here, so this is some sort of edition to be entered. --Username 21:15, 10 May 2022 (EDT)

Szabo B.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?212434; cover of 2 zombie books is same, PV of 1st long-gone, Balasz is not used in either 1 on Archive.org, it's Balaz in both. --Username 12:37, 12 May 2022 (EDT)

Satanists

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1317298; I did several edits for this anthology today; it was a mess, with both HC having no page #, but more importantly Haining's introduction being given its actual title and the 2 Sun essays having to be imported to the editions that were missing them (and both being misspelled). But the Derleth intro is the most curious, because it was only in the American Pyramid edition on ISFDB, but the cover of the American Taplinger edition clearly mentions it, so I imported that, but neither British edition mentions it; is it possible it was written especially for the Americans? I changed the date to match that of Taplinger, but if anyone can verify it was in the British HC then date can be adjusted (and imported to British PB if anyone can verify it was in there, too). --Username 14:39, 12 May 2022 (EDT)

Potter?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?2682; That Bloch cover looked familiar; turns out it was from Lisa Cantrell's Manse, so I changed artist to Bob Eggleton and made a variant; however, 2 of the other Potter books are OK but the Leiber cover has no variant (clearly Potter's style, though); so does anyone know where it originally came from? --Username 15:33, 12 May 2022 (EDT)

Which books are you meaning? You linked to a publication series with a bunch of titles. You can post links to the specific publications, that will be helpful. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:10, 12 May 2022 (EDT)
I would have, except there's only 1 Leiber book on the page. When I wrote that the other 2 books are OK that meant I didn't need to ask anything about them. --Username 19:25, 12 May 2022 (EDT)
It still would have reduced the effort required to figure out what you're talking about if you have linked directly to the publication. Like that. The easier you make it for people to help you, the quicker you'll get the response you want. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 20:07, 12 May 2022 (EDT)
Having another one of your bad days, Joe? Also, if you're going to reject so many of my author images because they're book covers, regardless of how uncommon they are or whether, as in Richard Wagner's case, they illustrate an important point about the man himself, not to mention that I've seen probably thousands of author images on ISFDB that are book or magazine covers, raising the question of why those were accepted by you and other mods, especially since in many/most cases non-book/magazine images are available online, and you're going to unnecessarily import photos to the Wiki, the least you could do is find images that aren't at the top of the authors' Wikipedia pages, as is the case with all 3 (Wagner, Fuller, Brown) you rejected today. Also also, what's the point of deleting Green Manifesto out of all the contents reviewed in that magazine issue, negating the substantial info I added to its record, instead of just marking it "non-genre" like countless other books on ISFDB? --Username 20:19, 12 May 2022 (EDT)
Please stop being a jerk. We aren't your slaves, and you seem to take great glee in being as obtuse and difficult as possible. You've been asked countless times now to include reasons for your submissions, to include links to what you're specifically talking about in your posts here, and to not treat moderators as your personal slaves. Still, you persist. If you took just a couple extra moments to make our job easier, you wouldn't have so many submission waiting for approval or questions left unanswered here because you refuse to use common courtesy. This is a collaborative project, so please try to be a little more collaborative in the future.
Regarding author images, it's always best to use an image that isn't a book cover as using the book cover is somewhat iffy when it comes to fair use. If there's an acceptable image, even if it's used on Wikipedia, then we should use that image (or one of the images, if there are multiple images available). Any authors that are using a full book cover as the author image should be reviewed to see if there's a better image available.
As for the non-genre book and review that were removed, they were removed because the book is non-genre (it's a political book about steps that should be taken to save the planet) and neither author is above the threshold (this non-genre book was their only work recorded here). I placed the review information in the notes of the publication in which the review appeared. I noticed it appeared to be non-genre, so I checked to see if the authors were above the threshold. When I discovered they weren't, I deleted it. Pretty simple, really. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 20:33, 12 May 2022 (EDT)

Uploaded But Unused

With the recent Bruno Elettori or whatever his real name is discussions I was looking at books with his cover art and did a few cleanups for the James V. Smith books, but as I went to upload the Grafton cover for Beaststalker it told me there was already an image, and it turns out that OSTRICHSACK uploaded it in 2018 but never actually added it to the book's record, so I did. Is there a way to check and see how many other cover images they may have uploaded but never added? --Username 11:48, 15 May 2022 (EDT)

I think Ahaseurus might need to make a special report that shows that. The wiki has an Unused images special page, but it likely doesn't know if they are used by the main database (since that's outside the wiki software). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:21, 16 May 2022 (EDT)
You are correct that Unused images is only for the wiki and does not take the database into account. It gets tricky finding true unused ones as some images (example, alternate covers or back covers) are only used in notes so you cannot just look at the publication image field. -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:24, 16 May 2022 (EDT)
It would probably require it to review all the images in that list of unused images, then check the direct URLs for those images against those used in the database, and eliminate any that are used. A report could then be generated based on those images remaining. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:24, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Advanced Search options limited to registered users for performance reasons

All Advanced Search menu options have been limited to registered users for performance reasons. Hopefully this should help with the robot problems that we have been having recently. We'll see how it goes and tweak other software components as needed. Ahasuerus 17:58, 15 May 2022 (EDT)

Severance Package

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1360869; I don't think that HC with the insane price was ever published; this link, https://picclick.com/Severance-Package-by-Duane-Swierczynski-Paperback-First-Edition-224552226535.html, doesn't mention an earlier edition on copyright page (although there is a 2007 date also; not sure what that's about, so maybe the book was delayed). --Username 20:42, 15 May 2022 (EDT)

LibriVox

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?29415; I added a link to the 2022 Vampire Nemesis, was told it should be made its own record, and that was just approved; I'm wondering why there's such a huge gap, 2015-2022? Did they go out of business and then recently start again, or is there 7 years worth of genre works that were never entered here? --Username 11:19, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

By a (probably not) coincidence that gap corresponds to the time frame in which I was inactive. Sounds like a good project to go through The Fantastic Fiction links that appear on this page. Each category may be listed by release date and sorted by most recent.--swfritter 19:40, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Mon Mohan

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/note_search_results.cgi?OPERATOR=contains&NOTE_VALUE=mon+mohan; Notes about Brian Aldiss book cover designs by this person, but they also have a cover art credit, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?232231, which is blank. --Username 13:01, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Empty record deleted. -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:25, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Nicobobinus

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?17241; I added Amazon cover to Puffin edition but it's blurry because it's small; Archive.org copy has no OL cover and it's a later printing anyway with a higher price; the interior illustrations likely come from the original British HC edition which is not entered here, and possibly belong to the American edition, too (and the American cover likely dates from British HC edition), and the Puffin cover seems similar but not quite to the earlier editions, plus there's a German edition on Goodreads which has a completely different cover but other foreign editions have the same cover online. So maybe people here own any one of these many editions and can enter them here to lessen the confusion. EDIT: Also, I wonder if anyone knows why the cover image for the American edition on OL shows a cartoon of Riker from Star Trek: TNG taking a dump on a toilet that not only has the expected brown stains but also what looks like radioactive slime. Also, he's reading a Star Trek magazine; very meta. --Username 14:07, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Dark Voices

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?12252; Heads up that after someone uploaded Dark Voices 2 to Archive.org a year and a half ago the other volumes, most of which weren't published in America, are being added, but weirdly someone added 4 to Community Texts back in March while someone else just added it to Books to Borrow, which seems pointless since the Community edition is fully readable. However, 5 is also there (in Books to Borrow); what's odd about this volume is that while almost all the contributors are semi-famous/famous genre authors, the last story is by a complete genre unknown American, Myrna Elana, who apparently published no other horror fiction (regardless of her bio which says she's at work on a horror novel) and seems to have spent her time publishing and writing LESBIAN EROTICA. --Username 18:50, 16 May 2022 (EDT)

Tales of Terror

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?783292; This seems like a problem, because the ISBN seems to be from the Magnet PB here, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1786522; the Methuen (not Metheun) HC was already entered years earlier. Delete? --Username 13:06, 17 May 2022 (EDT)

The Surrogate Covers

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?998393; I added OL ID to Signet edition which has been on Archive.org since 2010; someone here added cover artist based on Paperbacks From Hell, but the British edition has most of the same art, except they changed the doll. Should cover art credit be imported? British copy on eBay doesn't have any credit. --Username 08:40, 18 May 2022 (EDT)

Thinner

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?414371; I just entered the real 1985 Bachman edition; this has a price almost double and should really be in the Stephen King record judging by the note. PV's gone so someone should decide what to do with this; maybe they have a copy of this edition. --Username 12:41, 18 May 2022 (EDT)

Gutenberg and LibriVox publications

Note. Some issues re Webpages links from our title and publication records pertain equally to HathiTrust Digital Library, and the Internet Archive, for instance, but we do not treat HDL and Archive.org images as publications.

We treat Gutenberg texts and LibriVox audio-recorded readings as publications. I understand we do not treat different file formats as different publications. Right? Therefore, it seems to me appropriate that our publication records link to Gutenberg and LibriVox catalogue pages (let me call them) which offer visitors a choice of formats. Right?

I find that our publication records of Gutenberg and LibriVox editions generally do not link to Gutenberg and LibriVox at all. Advanced search yields these counts of records whose Webpages field "contains" the string (that is, as part of a URL):

  • librivox : 1762 titles, 2 publications [publisher LibriVox, 710]
  • gutenberg : 12 titles, 5 publications [publisher Project Gutenberg, 4494]
  • archive.org : 3314 titles, 4882 publications
  • hathitrust : 468 titles, 68 publications
  • loc.gov : 18 titles, 18 publications

Evidently we are migrating archive.org links from title to publication records. And not migrating librivox.org links.

I conducted these searches today after submitting my first update of a LibriVox publication 5321408, in which I did add what would be our third publication Webpage at librivox.
(FWIW, I don't think we should have any LibriVox publications that neglect to identify the reader when LibriVox does so [always, I guess]; it appears that I updated such a one without adding that datum. So I have some sympathy.)

A majority (3) of our 5 publications with webpages at gutenberg[.something] are non-gutenberg editions for which gutenberg is one of our sources. Two are gutenberg.net.AU pages for PG of Australia ebooks.

Probably I missed a policy: we don't use the Webpages field to link the publisher's product page for the edition/printing. Right? --Pwendt|talk 21:52, 20 May 2022 (EDT)

It depends:
  • All Project Gutenberg publications automatically link to their respective Project Gutenberg pages. The ISFDB software creates the link automatically which is under "Other Links" in the left menu. There is no need to duplicate it in the web page field.
Thanks. I had forgotten that Gutenberg link in the margin.
We don't generate such a link for publication records of PG Australia ebooks, so our present Webpages links to gutenberg.net.au (2 of those 5 gutenberg links) are appropriate. Probably we should link gutenberg.ca among Webpages of PG Canada ebooks for the same reason. --Pwendt
  • For Library of Congress, if it is a LoC Catalog Number, then it should go in the External IDs which will automatically create a link. For older pubs (such as Famous Mystery Stories), the link is not the LoC Catalog record (https://lccn.loc.gov/22005893), but to a LoC hosted scan of the publication (https://www.loc.gov/item/22005893). I would still add the LoC Catalog number to to publication record.
  • The others are generally publication specific items and should be in the publication web link. However, we have not always had a publication web field and so older ones were entered at the title level. There has not been a systematic cleanup to move them to their respective publications.
  • As for publisher webpages, it depends. If the webpage is for that specific publication and has meaningful information, it can be on the publication level. If it's just an ad, I wouldn't bother.
Hope that helps. -- JLaTondre (talk) 09:05, 21 May 2022 (EDT)
(contd from inline above) By "publisher" I did mean narrowly Gutenberg for ebooks and LibriVox for audiobooks --publisher page being the one with metadata and a choice of formats, all of which we consider a single publication.
My move of one link to LibriVox was approved overnight, so I am happy to update:
* librivox : 1761 titles, 3 publications
I agree with the apparent consensus that it has low priority. For me something to do given another reason to revise the records, such as here--to identify the translator. --Pwendt|talk 13:46, 22 May 2022 (EDT)

Index of Project Gutenberg Works ...

Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Haggard, ed. David Widger, 2018-10-29, Ebook #58163 : catalogue page ; html format (top)

What should we make of Ebook #58163? Is it NONFICTION we should acquire? Is its catalogue page no more than an Author webpage? Or something in between? --Pwendt|talk 22:03, 20 May 2022 (EDT)

As it is a downloadable ebook, it is within the ISFDB scope. It can be entered as NONFICTION as we do with physical checklist publications. It is more a question as to whether you feel there is enough value in the Project Gutenberg indexes to take your time adding them or if you have other work you would rather do. -- JLaTondre (talk) 09:10, 21 May 2022 (EDT)

Darkfuse

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2072743; Wordgrinder entered Penkas story as "Note Seen" in HC; they haven't been here in many years, and ISFDB is the only search on Google for "Note Seen", so it's likely "Not Seen", in case anyone else has the HC and can correct it. --Username 08:53, 23 May 2022 (EDT)

Twenty Years (or, It Just Feels Like It)

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5317059; I was confused about this until I realized I submitted my edit on 5-14 and a person who isn't a regular coincidentally PV it and entered price info a couple of days after me which was approved very quickly (cough), so now instead of my entry of the page #'s from the only copy I could find on the web that actually showed contents page being approved I'm supposed to check with this person first, who didn't enter those #'s even though they must have a copy otherwise they wouldn't have PV it; if anyone else wants to enter those page numbers and then check with PV go ahead, since I'm not re-doing rejected edits anymore. Now that I look at edit history I realize this person deleted my price info which was entered months ago and just replaced it with their own instead of adding their info to my existing info; talk about etiquette. --Username 10:13, 23 May 2022 (EDT)

For Want of a Nail

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5317182; Can anyone substitute a better cover that isn't faded and dirty like the current one but also shows the NAIL on the right side? --Username 10:21, 23 May 2022 (EDT)

Gilbert Wright

While checking info for an unnecessarily rejected edit of mine I came across this, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?15653; I doubt a British artist from 1911 also published a story in a 1945 American magazine (Blue Book), but it's possible, in case anyone knows for sure, and if they're not the same then (artist) could be added to the 1911 guy. --Username 11:19, 24 May 2022 (EDT)

Confusing Cacek

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?3865; Someone's been entering missing collections of P.D. Cacek's short stories lately, and I noticed that "...with bright and shining eyes..." was entered as original, but I knew that wasn't right because I added a gothic.net link a while back, remembered from when I found it years ago, and also entered info for Quietly Now, the anthology where the story either first appeared or was reprinted, hard to tell. However, as I checked further there were like half-a-dozen stories by her that were marked original that really aren't, and it's hard to say how titles appeared because a lot of them appeared in REALLY obscure publications. So I mention all this in case when my variant edits are approved anyone may look into them further and possibly un-variant a few, because some of them seem pretty fishy to me and probably do have exactly the same titles between original publication and her collections and were just entered wrong here. --Username 21:45, 24 May 2022 (EDT)

Titled excerpts

What's the best way to handle excerpts that have their own title? I just came across a 6-page excerpt introduced as "There Are Elves Out There" [over] "An Excerpt from" [over] Born to Run. I think it should be a SHORTFICTION with a title note that it's an excerpt. Opinions? Phil 08:35, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

The help page spells it out clearly: " If the excerpt has a different title that the work from which it is excerpted, use that title. Otherwise, use the title of the excerpted work, but add " (excerpt)" to the end; e.g. "A Feast for Crows (excerpt)"." :)
So yes, it should be "There Are Elves Out There", short fiction, with a note explaining that it is an excerpt and from where. Annie 14:59, 27 May 2022 (EDT)
Thanks! Some days are just derp... Phil 15:09, 27 May 2022 (EDT)
Oh, I know - too many different things to remember (some of which are not very common so they kinda get forgotten). Which is why I pointed out where it is in the help page - it may be my most visited page around here... :) Annie 15:12, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Rex Miller - Above the threshold?

I'm holding a submission to add a non-genre novel by Rex Miller. Do we think he is above the threshold? I see there is one non-genre story in his bibliography, but that is included in an genre anthology. What do folks think? --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 09:43, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

I am not familiar with this author's work, but reviews suggest that his main splatterpunk series, "Chaingang", is borderline SF at best. The only speculative element that I could find is that the serial killer protagonist seems to have a "danger sense" of sorts. Some plots are also wildly implausible to the point of being almost surrealistic, but not really speculative. If this can be confirmed, we may want to make these title "non-genre" or at least add notes explaining that they are borderline SF. Ahasuerus 11:50, 27 May 2022 (EDT)
That's a different issue and if investigation bears out, we could change them. The submission I am holding is to add a new non-genre novel. I'm just trying to determine whether the consensus is that this author is above the threshold so that we should list all of his non-genre works. It was reviewed in Locus, but in 2015, Hauck converted it to a review of a non-genre work. I assume the the original review was of type REVIEW and was presumably linked to a title record. I speculate that Hauck deleted any existing title or publication records for this novel at the same time. The ultimate question is whether we want to undo the 2015 work and re-add this novel. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 13:38, 27 May 2022 (EDT)
I don't think so - his horror is marginally ours because of essentially a sixth sense kinda thing; that should not make all his other work eligible though... Annie 15:03, 27 May 2022 (EDT)
Hearing no arguments for including this title, I've rejected the submission. Thanks all. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 15:31, 29 May 2022 (EDT)
Shame about that; it would have been cool to have a novel about Vietnam approved on Memorial Day weekend. So I guess nothing changes with the Locus review, right? Anyway, to all my fellow Americans reading this, Happy Memorial Day and God Bless America. Before I go, I think now is an appropriate time to mention the case of the missing Trump, by which I mean that to-do months ago where some mod with a grudge didn't accept my photo of Trump because it had a political message on it, which resulted in someone else uploading a non-political photo to our Wiki, which then mysteriously disappeared recently, which I believe only a mod has the permission to do. I recently found another photo that I liked and that's in his record now, but I'm still curious about who was responsible for that; I'm sure the trail can be traced. --Username 18:23, 29 May 2022 (EDT)

Twin Lynches

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?23755; David K. Lynch just showed up on the recent activity list, and I see that interview belongs to the other David Lynch of Twin Peaks fame, but it's in a PV issue of TZ magazine, so a decision needs to be made about how to separate him from the other Lynch. --Username 10:19, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

PV Dagon

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?277149; Surprisingly there's still a lot of work to be done on Arkham House books, and while doing some I came across that page which is PV not by the usual Arkham PV but 2 uncommon PV, one of whom hasn't left a message in a year and a half (might need a "no longer active") and the other who clearly won't be responding to anything anymore judging by his messages, so someone may want to look at this, because that "none" under Catalog ID seems unnecessary. EDIT: Also noticed this is a rare Arkham book with an unstable Amazon image; didn't replace it but found this, https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/dagon-macabre-tales-p-lovecraft-1845762682, which is that 4th printing but has a $10.00 sticker over the previous price, so I don't know if that counts as another edition or what. --Username 11:50, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Curwen Street

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63286; original Arkham has "House ON Curwen Street", not OF, and so does the Carroll & Graf which I just entered page #'s for. "Of" doesn't make sense, so this may be an entry error here of long standing. EDIT: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1358135 (right title with subtitle), http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?978579 (right title with shorter subtitle), http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?563345 (right title). --Username 12:57, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Kull

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234404262828; No Archive copies or searchable Google copies, 2 ISFDB records (1 of which likely should be deleted), eBay link verifies date on copyright page and price on back cover barcode, but # of pages is a mystery; is it 214, 256, 224 as Open Library says, or something else? Anyone here have a copy? http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?10220 --Username 18:01, 27 May 2022 (EDT)

Bogus image-related yellow warnings fixed

I believe I have fixed the software bug which caused invalid yellow warning to be displayed on submission review pages for Author Edit and Clone Publication submissions when editing image URLs. If you come across anything unusual or unexpected, please let me know. Ahasuerus 13:46, 29 May 2022 (EDT)

Nightwalker Editions

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/nightwalker-thomas-tessier-centipede-1761310973; http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?14418; I did a lot of Thomas Tessier edits recently, and I think most of them are approved now, but since I check my edits afterwards I see that apparently I forgot to backdate the intro by Jack Ketchum to 2008 because it was originally from Leisure, not Centipede. Checking further, the afterword by Tessier actually has a title, Back Then, so I fixed that and imported it into Centipede, too, and that Worthpoint link above shows a piece of it and after typing the phrase "was hot stuff" which I can barely make out I can confirm that it got a hit for the Google Books copy of the Crossroad Press edition, which is not on ISFDB but may be in that Tomes of Terror, which is a Crossroad omnibus; I don't see the Ketchum intro, though, so maybe they dropped it. So all this is a long way of saying that after all my Tessier edits are approved anyone owning any editions may want to do any further tweaking that may be needed, because they just reprinted the hell out of this guy's books, and Centipede's site going on about new material seems to be the usual publisher BS (unless there's also a new intro and afterword in that edition along with the old ones, in which case, go Centipede). --Username 23:34, 29 May 2022 (EDT)

Falcons of Narabedla

A few months back Stonecreek opened this discussion, suggesting Falcons of Narabedla should be a novella in stead of a novel. There were two responses, both against this change. Surprisingly (or not) yesterday he changed it anyway (see http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1946 here], except for four publications that have primary verifications by others (see here, probably because he knew this would leat to protests. Now we have the same text under two different titlerecords. Do we accept this behaviour? --Willem 05:37, 31 May 2022 (EDT)

This isn't correct and the changes should be reverted. We have the exception for works less than novel length being considered novels if they appear in an Ace Double. If someone wants to change that exception, we would need to reach consensus in the Rules and Standards board before doing so. I'd like to hear why Stonecreek made this change and split this title into two different ones. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 09:36, 31 May 2022 (EDT)t
I didn't split that title into two: there already was the novella of the same title (and also a CHAPBOOK): I have just merged the ones that were quite obviously publications of texts of the novella with the existing one.
I can only give advice to you, Willem, to do some research before pleading 'guilty': you then would have found Originally published in May, 1957, in Other Worlds magazine with publications maculated by you.
(An aside: you really want to state that the Ace Doubles have near to 350 words on a page?) Christian Stonecreek 04:45, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
Looking at last week's database dump, Stonecreek is correct that there was already a NOVEL and a SHORTFICTION (novella) record. However, in the processing of merging, Stonecreek turned what was the NOVEL record (1946) into the novella and created a new NOVEL record (3040549) with the old novella record no longer existing. This wasn't the greatest as any external links to the NOVEL record would now be incorrect. He also left a a novel publication under the novella record. While a discussion on how Ace Double should be handled is better suited for the Rules and standards, if these two records are really for the exact same text, having it as a NOVEL and a novella is not the best solution. -- JLaTondre (talk) 07:27, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
Yeah, sorry for hitting the wrong title (1964) to merge with, could have bitten into my ass (and would have done so, if I would have been able to reach it).
I really do think we only have texts of novella length in this case, with the 1964 Ace publication maybe slightly expanded (or maybe just revised).
I just set out to adapt the remaining incongruency when this again unnecessary discussion popped up. Christian Stonecreek 08:55, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
Done. Christian Stonecreek 10:50, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
A few things:
I didn't split that title into two: yes you did. The novella in Otherworlds is completely different from the novel. I downloaded the text from Gutenberg, it has exactly 26.727 words and starts with the same phrase as the novel, but ends with "She smiled. "Does it?" But her bright eyes had given me my answer, and I never had to make up my mind again". Now this title is polluted with the expanded edition that ends with "I heard it, drew a deep breath and then put my arm around Cynara, calling to Adric to come and share it with me". A little research would have prevented this mistake. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Willem H. (talk • contribs) .
No, I didn't. I unmerged the falsely connected titles and merged them with an existing one. For your willingly not understanding mind that does mean that the split existed before. (added by Stonecreek)
Yes you did. You split out every non-verified record. Or do you really think the 188 page Portuguese edition, or the 154 page trade paperback contain the short version? And what is your source for the e-book editions? --Willem 05:55, 7 June 2022 (EDT)
No, I didn't: two versions were there before, and the same two versions are there after. And do you have nearer insight of the Portuguese edition (any word count, number of pages with fiction, no illustrations or other additional material), and yes, the tp seems to hold a text of only novella length, like the one that was already there). (added by Stonecreek)
See above for how the two versions end. It's quite easy to determine which it is, or should I ask Mavmaramis since you refuse to answer questions? --Willem 14:12, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
Originally published in May, 1957, in Other Worlds magazine is not mentioned in the Ace double editions. Only "©1964, by Ace Books, Inc." —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Willem H. (talk • contribs) .
You may have noted that these publications still have (mistakenly, see above and below) the text as novels. (added by Stonecreek)
Yes. and don't you dare touch these! So far I count two people opposing your change, and you are the only one in favor. --Willem 05:55, 7 June 2022 (EDT)
Well, two people vs. me and your own estimate: It's possible that it's a novel, but the estimates do point towards a higher likelihood that it is a novella. So, I repeat again: why do you do an estimate and then don't use it? Please explain. Christian Stonecreek 06:54, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
I will use it, but I have the habit of discussing things before making changes. --Willem 14:12, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
you really want to state that the Ace Doubles have near to 350 words on a page?: no, it's only 323 words per page. I counted (in the 2nd printing) three (average) pages, and that's the average. Multiplied by 127 pages of text that gives 39.729 words or very close to novel length. How did you count Christian? --Willem 15:32, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
That's close to novel length but still below. How do you come to the conclusion that a count below a threshold qualifies a text to lie above it? I do think your argumentation is getting weirder and weirder and deviates more and more from facts, Willem. Christian Stonecreek 01:44, 2 June 2022 (EDT)
Ever heard of a margin of error Christian? It's less than 1%, so unless you want to count every word in the book, it should remain as it was. By the way, you didn't answer my question. By what method tid you reach the amazingly incorrect wordcount of the publications of the original novella can't have more than 35,000 words. See above for an exact wordcount of the novella. Either your count is 8.000 too high (if you counted the novella), or 5.000 words too low (if you counted the novel). --Willem 05:55, 7 June 2022 (EDT)
What is wrong with 'can't have more than 35,000 words' when the actual word count lies below it? It was a very rough estimate for an upper limit - just to ensure the title type - but absolutely correct to ensure it's of novella length. I do give a specific range (for example 30,000 - 32,000), when the estimate is finer.
And why do you do an estimate when you don't intend to use the result?
Your estimate seems to be quite incorrect: there are 12 chapters for which one has easily to substract about 1,000 words (likely more) for empty space around their respective beginnings / endings. And this would put the corrected estimate for the expanded / revised 1964 version at about 38,000 - 39,000 words, I think. Christian Stonecreek 08:54, 7 June 2022 (EDT)
So you finally do acknowledge that there are two different versions of the story. Now which version did you do a "very rough" word count of, the original novella or the expanded edition? Your remarks above seem to imply the first. You verified two publications, the German translation and the 1984 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?640300 Arrow edition]. I can't imagine you used the German translation (could be abridged), so that leaves the Arrow wdition, but according to Worldcat and the British Library that one states ©1964, the date of the Ace version and thus the expanded edition. Please explain. --Willem 16:03, 10 June 2022 (EDT)
So your counting ability has also suffered a loss, you may have to count again. Christian Stonecreek 06:54, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
I copied the Other Worlds text of Falcons from the title to the last word using the "Full Text" option on Archive.org and pasted it on the site I mentioned somewhere above a while back, wordcount.com, and got these results: 27,462 Words 154,640 Characters 120,876 Characters without space 36,576 Syllables 1,890 Sentences 4,654 Paragraphs. In case that makes a difference as to what length it should be entered as here. --Username 07:25, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
Many thanks for your assistance; it seems that we do have the original text (novella - the one with an estimate of 27,462 words, first published 1957) and a somewhat expanded version (most likely a novella - by all word count estimates so far - Willem just conceded that his original estimate of 39.729 words was too high, this text was first published in 1964 by Ace). Christian Stonecreek 07:33, 11 June 2022 (EDT):
OK. Also, I just added Archive link to the 1974 Spanish-language edition, awaiting approval, which was uploaded early last year. There's also this, https://archive.org/details/Dimensions1419540506, which includes Falcons' first chapter and mentions in the uploader's note that the second chapter was published in the next issue of Dimensions, but that doesn't seem to be on Archive, and magazine went out of business so serialization was never completed, anyway. Also, https://archive.org/details/falconsofnarabedla_1709_librivox, because as I mentioned somewhere recently there's a huge gap in LibriVox entries on ISFDB and this is probably one of many that should be on here. I at first thought the title was NARABEDIA, and that actually gets a few hits, https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22falcons%20of%20narabedia%22&sin=TXT, so other people thought that was the title, too. There's also this, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27044742M/I_falconi_di_Narabedla, which says previewable when searching for the title but seems that got taken down, but anyway it's an edition not on ISFDB. I also added Archive link, awaiting approval, to the 1979 Ace edition, uploaded way back in 2010, but oddly it doesn't show up when searching for the title on Archive.org, only on OL. There's also 2 records on OL for a March 1988 Time Warner UK edition, but WorldCat link leads to 1984 Arrow. Also added Luminist PDF, awaiting approval, to the 1964 dos version. So it's not surprising there's questions about the word count because they reprinted this thing so many times and in so many ways it's hard to know what the definitive text is. --Username 08:03, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
Nobody denied that the Other Worlds version is a novella. Above I gave a wordcount of 26.727 as athe result of pasting the text in MS Word. Also I did not say anything about my estimate of 39.729 words for the expanded version. Christian, do not try to twist my words, but answer my question. Which version of the text did you do a "very rough" word count of. --Willem 08:11, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
So, you deny that you phrased something like 'the book, it should remain as it was' (meaning that you're convinced that it's not a novella)?
Don't try to circumnavigate the point, Willem! That is, we try to determine the length of the second version, which seems to have to stay as a novel because of a faulty overestimation of yours (and of which you decided that it should not count towards determining the title type). Please come up with a corrected estimate that takes the empty spaces into the account. It really seems that there's no novel of the title Falcons of Narabedla by MZB anywhere in sight. Christian Stonecreek 10:49, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
1. "it should remain as it was" because novel length falls within the margin of error. Is that so hard to understand?
2. If you want to prove anything, come up with a far better wordcount than you did.
3. You are not helping to determine which publication has which version of the story. So for the third time, which version of the text did you do a "very rough" word count of. --Willem 14:12, 11 June 2022 (EDT)
ad 1.: You wrote of a margin of error of 1%. That may have had some validity for your faulty word count of 39.729, which is too high, as you condescended. So, once again, please supply a more correct word count, Willem. What is wrong with your attitude that you can't supply that, it's really only a rough count of the empty spaces: how much pages does it add up to?
ad 2.: See below (ad. 3.).
ad 3.: As explained in the discussion above: I didn't do a 'rough word count', I supplied an upper limit for the initially 1957 published text. There the corresponding note appears: what did you not understand about the note? You are constantly failing to supply a more correct word count for the 1964 version. So, I assume it would be right to add a note to it that it's most likely a novella? (And, please no more circumnavigating of yours). Christian Stonecreek 06:32, 12 June 2022 (EDT)
ad 1.:I explained my method of counting above and I'm satisfied with the result. If you have doubts, provide a better word count yourself, don't try command me. You're getting abusive again.
ad 3.:Then let's go back to the original discussion, or have you forgotten about that. Do you still think this publication contains the original novella? Do some research before accusing me af anything! --Willem 04:50, 13 June 2022 (EDT)
ad 1.: So I ask you again: How much of the blank space (if any) has gone into your estimate? And what was the abusive phrase I supplied: instead of stating things like those, please give a concrete citation. I just asked to give a more correct estimate.
ad 3.: You are correct: all the texts of this title that I have seen are of novella length. Christian Stonecreek 08:44, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

(unindent) I am trying to wrap my head around this discussion, but a number of comments are unsigned and I am having trouble figuring out who said what. Could the contributors please sign their comments above? Ahasuerus 11:07, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

Done so far for mine comments with '(added by Stonecreek)', I'd think. Christian Stonecreek 11:34, 13 June 2022 (EDT)
Added the'unsigned' template to mine. --Willem 12:46, 13 June 2022 (EDT)
Thanks for clarification. I will review the discussion and hopefully comment tomorrow morning. Ahasuerus 18:58, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

(unindent) It looks like there are a few separate issues here. The first one is substantive, i.e. the issue of separating the two different texts now that we have confirmed that the original story was expanded for book publication (which SFE agrees with.) I have checked my copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack and confirmed that it contains the shorter, 1957, version of the text. We should ask primary verifiers of the affected pubs (including translations) to check what the last sentence says and update their verified records to avoid questions in the future.

We should also add a note explaining that some editions claim that this work is part of the Darkover series, but, as SFE says, the link is "marginal". This is also the case with The Door Through Space, another early Bradley novel, which also needs to be updated with this information. Ahasuerus 13:56, 14 June 2022 (EDT)

Word counts have been added and Notes have been expanded. I have also updated all versions of Falcons of Narabedla and The Door Through Space with information about their links to the Darkover series. I have also created a series for the 3 versions of The Door Through Space and added notes about its unusual history. SFE will be updated shortly. Ahasuerus 11:35, 15 June 2022 (EDT)

The second issue is deciding whether we want to make the expanded 1964 text a novella as opposed to a novel. As was pointed out during the first iteration of this discussion, Template:TitleFields:TitleType says:

  • NOVEL. ... For Ace Doubles, each content title will typically be a NOVEL, rather than SHORTFICTION, unless one of the constituent works is itself an anthology or a collection.

Given that our current best estimate is 39,729 words, the rules as currently formulated clearly favor making it a NOVEL. We should explicitly document this application of the rules in the Note field of the novel title. We should also state the known word count of the 1957 version in its Note field.

The third issue is whether the current Help exception for Ace Doubles is a good idea. My current take on it is "maybe not", but that's something to discuss on the Rules and Standards page, assuming that there is interest.

The fourth issue is the steps taken by Stonecreek to move these two texts between publications. The right way to do it would have been to re-open the February discussion and post new evidence suggesting that certain publication records had been linked to the wrong title record. Then other editors would have been able to check the word counts and first/last lines of whatever editions they had access to -- see Username's comments and my Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack example above -- instead of relying on what he thought was "quite obvious".

The way it was done, i.e. without re-opening the discussion and against the outcome of an older one, caused confusion, stress, distrust and a variety of data problems, which were outlined in JLaTondre's response above. This was a self-inflicted wound which should not have happened and then it just spun out of control, causing defensive responses, flaming and even more stress for everyone involved.

This is not something that a self-approver should be doing. As I wrote on Stonecreek's Talk page in January 2022:

  • Since you are a self-approver, the responsibility to enforce ISFDB conventions and keep records self-consistent falls on you. Please make sure this doesn't happen again or else it will jeopardize your self-approver status.

Given my repeated warnings on Stonecreek's Talk page, e.g.:

  • This is not what the self-approver status was created for; additional instances of this behavior or any other abuse of the privileges will result in their termination.

I don't think Stonecreek's self-approver privileges can be retained. I will let him respond here before I make the final determination.

P.S. I have notified SFE about various minor issues with their Bradley entry. Ahasuerus 13:56, 14 June 2022 (EDT)

I do apologize if I turned wrong in any of my actions. Alone: I didn't touch the Ace Books, I only merged the novella length publications with the already existing novella title (and I checked the available sources, i.e. Amazon's Look Inside - the archive.org links are no help, so I think I did use the available information). The reason it got reprinted so much after 2010 is the expiry of the 1957 copyright. And I'm sincerely sorry for causing any stress & problems in the data (but I think this is independent from this specific problem, it may have occurred in an unrelated act) but where there really any? (I don't remember deleting any title, only transforming them, so any relation should have remained!).
Finally, if there are really only two versions of "Falcons of Narabedla" they both seem to be novellas: the Arrow publication is considerably shorter than 39.729 words, and the German translation of 2001 is longer with about 38,000 words (but it should be with German needing a bit more words to express the same). Christian Stonecreek 16:27, 14 June 2022 (EDT)
I am going to revoke Stonecreek's self-approver privileges for the time being. After a 2 week cooldown period -- let's make it until July 1 to be it exact -- Stonecreek will be able to re-apply for the self-approver status using the regular nomination/self-nomination process. Ahasuerus 20:48, 14 June 2022 (EDT)
Thanks. Not being aware that my privileges were seemingly not used in a proper way, I'll nevertheless seek concordance in possibly upcoming cases like these. Christian Stonecreek 01:50, 15 June 2022 (EDT)
 :::: I'll let this discussion rest, and try to establish which publication should be under which title. It seems plausible that the post 2010 e-books and super-packs contain the 1957 version (a few notes would have helped a lot). I'll ask Stonecreek about the German translations and Mavmaramis about the Arrow edition. I assume the Portuguese translation is of the 1964 text (188 pages). If no proof otherwise is given, I'll return that one to the expanded title. The 2013 Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust edition is definitely the 1964 text. Amazon shows the first pages of the kindle version of that book, which I compared to the Ace Double and Gutenberg text. --Willem 14:49, 15 June 2022 (EDT)
For the Arrow edition I have come to an average of about 254 words per page, with an absolute high of 266 words on one page in my sample, and with an overall majority seeming to lie just beneath or around 250 words a page: the reason for the difference to Mavmaramis' estimate seems to lie in not discounting the empty space and the shorter lines (for example of dialogue and paragraph endings). I think the right way to do an estimate is to actually count the words on representative sample pages (and discount unused space of chapter endings & beginnings). Thus, this word count estimate does lie beneath the threshold of 40,000 words: at 37,772 (just taking the high point page), at 36,608 for the average, and even below that for the 'impressionist' average. Christian Stonecreek 01:03, 16 June 2022 (EDT)

Son of the Flying Tiger

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?824087; Anyone have a copy of the original 1973 edition? Someone (possibly) bootlegged it in 2020 and uploaded to Archive.org (in Community Texts so the net police wouldn't find it), and its covers and title/copyright pages are original with just a 1-line publisher/date added by the (possible) bootlegger. However, the novel ends on p. 181 and ISFDB's sources say 189. My page change was rejected, so I'd like to know if it's really 181 so it can be un-rejected. Anyway, I'm not adding the new edition, but the (possibly) bootleg copy is fully readable. --Username 21:59, 31 May 2022 (EDT)

Even if someone were to confirm a different page count, the submission could not be unrejected as it also attempts to add a scan of the 2020 Orphanwerk Press edition to the 1973 Venus Freeway Press edition. Scans are great, but they should only be added to the publication record which appears in the scan. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 17:25, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
Important thing is getting the right page count confirmed and entered if someone says it's 181 (well, important for the purposes of this database; nobody really gives a damn what the page count is); that (possibly) bootleg edition should have been put in note to mod by me just to show the last page is 181, not put in web page section, so my edit can stay rejected and I will enter the new page count in another edit. --Username 17:36, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
Two different Worldcat records have the page count as 189, Reginald1 has it as 188 (discrepancy could be due to an unnumbered final page). A scan of a different edition is not a more authoritative source than those cited. If you come up with a better source that the page count is incorrect, then it can be changed. If you can't, please don't attempt to change the page count. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 18:14, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
To be clear, the page count will stay the way it is now unless someone who owns/can get their hands on the 1973 edition responds here with verification (a photo of the last page would be nice) of 181. I won't change it otherwise. Let's be honest, odds are nobody will ever respond and I'll forget about this quickly and go do edits for a thousand other things. --Username 18:24, 1 June 2022 (EDT)

Where in the WorldCat

WorldCat's dead. --Username 09:24, 1 June 2022 (EDT)

Ah, that was the reason I didn't found an entry for a recently added publication. Though I expect the line "WorldCat will return", like in a certain 2022 movie, will hold true. Christian Stonecreek 10:48, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
I just visited the Worldcat site. It seems to be having a database problem (it's only giving errors when you do a search). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 12:37, 1 June 2022 (EDT)
It has returned! Christian Stonecreek 15:03, 1 June 2022 (EDT)

Cover modification bug fixed

Bug 642, "Cover Art Modification Bug":

If only the date [or another field value in a COVERART record] is changed, it still shows the title and artist as having been changed.

has been fixed. If you come across anything unexpected, please let me know. Ahasuerus 17:52, 1 June 2022 (EDT)

Technical Fiction

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?9372; I think those 3 chapbooks should be non-fiction, and that Trek Technical non-fiction should be a chapbook. --Username 12:40, 2 June 2022 (EDT)

Satan on the Loose!

While entering page #'s for the '65 Consul of Derleth's anthology Night's Yawning Peal, I looked up the '74 Signet and while everything there seems to be covered, there's a picture online of the back cover with an ad for a book called Satan on the Loose. It seems not to be fiction but rather non-fiction from a Mex ex-gang member who turned his life over to Jesus and was the subject of that well-known book/movie The Cross and the Switchblade. I know this book (and others he wrote which have similar "horror" titles) probably don't belong on this site, but as can be seen here, [3], many have sweet cover art more appropriate to 80's horror paperbacks. Only 2 copies of Satan are on Open Library and they share the same (uncredited) cover art, with 1 chapter about SATAN'S COMPUTER PROGRAMS (or PROGRAMMES in the British edition), and a stunning note on the British back cover that The Cross and the Switchblade was made into a comic book! So some of those covers may have been done by genre artists and, if so, that may be a way to get those editions on here. These old religious books (not the later Left Behind junk) are a huge void here with many having intros or art done by genre people (many probably hoping nobody would ever find out they were the ones responsible). --Username 14:26, 2 June 2022 (EDT)

Display of pseudonymous reviews fixed

Bug 165, "Pseudonymous reviews do not display reviewer's canonical name", has been fixed. Ahasuerus 17:04, 2 June 2022 (EDT)

Fighting Fantasy Question

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?459101; I added a lot of info to this, accepted today, so now that it's in my note about the 2 sample adventures being included, is this really still a novel, non-fiction, collection, or what? --Username 19:59, 2 June 2022 (EDT)

It's a novel - provided it's over the 40,000 words threshold (but should be with this page count): since it seems to be entirely fictional it can't be nonfiction. Christian Stonecreek 06:47, 3 June 2022 (EDT)
I had a copy of this as a kid; from ~30 year old memory it is a role playing game rulebook that has no narrative content. The 2 adventures I believe are standard gamemaster + players RPG scenarios, as opposed to the choose-your-own-adventure style single player branching narrative found in the main Fighting Fantasy series. As such, I suspect it is ineligible for inclusion here per ISFDB:Policy#Exclusions?
In a similar vein - but a book I've never actually seen a copy of, so will defer to others' opinion - I saw this a few days ago, which I believe is also a set of RPG rules in paperback form, and so probably shouldn't be listed here. ErsatzCulture 12:31, 3 June 2022 (EDT)
I added Archive link in my recent edit, in case anyone wants to see it and decide. --Username 12:51, 3 June 2022 (EDT)
Both these books are in Reginald3, so I'd hate to lose them. Additionally one is in Locus1 and the other in Clute/Grant. With the two chose your own adventure items, I definitely think the Jackson book should stay with those items as SHORTFICTION. I do think Reginald got the it wrong (see the note) and it probably is better described as NONFICTION as noted in Clute/Grant. For the other book, I'd still want to keep it by virtue of it's mention in two of our standard genre sources. --Ron ~ RtraceTalk 17:47, 3 June 2022 (EDT)

Backslash searches fixed

Bug 278, "Search on backslash characters fails", has been fixed. Please note that the database that we are using, MySQL, is configured to treat the backslash character (\), "Ä", "Æ", "ä" and "æ" as identical by default. We won't be able to correct it until we upgrade the whole database to Unicode. Ahasuerus 20:03, 2 June 2022 (EDT)

The Elephant Talks to God

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?862319; My edit for the '89 ed. was just accepted, then I just added/fixed stuff for the '06 TP (not approved yet), but that says on back cover that it includes most of the original stories plus new ones, except the '89 copy on Archive.org has no contents and is just one 60-page story, while the '06 copy on Archive.org has titles for individual stories. So not sure what's to be done; also, '06 TP says page count is 123 but it ends at 122 and only thing on next page is a photo of Dumbo derrière, so it maybe should be changed to 122. --Username 12:15, 3 June 2022 (EDT)

The 1989 edition is not one long story, it too is made up of individual tales. There is no TOC and there are no titles, but the text is the same. For example:
  • The text beginning on page 7 (1989) is 'The Ant's Point of View' on page 106 (2006)
  • The text beginning on page 9 (1989) is 'A Woman from China' on page 11 (2006)
  • The text beginning on page 13 (1989) is 'Not Profound' on page 9 (2006)
Perhaps making the named stories variants of disambiguated untitled stories? Plus, extensive notes. I'm interested to hear from others who have dealt with similar situations. John Scifibones 13:33, 3 June 2022 (EDT)

German Verne

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?428612; Typing title and publisher on Amazon led to this, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Jules-Verne/dp/B0000BTYIL, which isn't the right book but is a title on ISFDB, so the 1 Verne title by the publisher on ISFDB is probably missing other Verne books. --Username 15:42, 3 June 2022 (EDT)

Sure: there are lots of other titles by Verne in various translations and hundreds of German publications missing! If you'd like to add some, please do so (best for those olden days publications to rely on DNB, not Amazon). If there are questions, please don't hesitate to ping me. Christian Stonecreek 12:46, 5 June 2022 (EDT)
I'm barely fluent in English, much less other languages. After ~30,000 edits I can probably count on my fingers and toes how many foreign editions I've entered, so whenever I see an interesting topic concerning foreign editions I mention it in case anyone fluent in those languages wants to look at it, which has resulted in positive responses and new entries before; enge Bekanntschaften, do your best. --Username 13:07, 5 June 2022 (EDT)
I know there's a lot to do, but I'm barely achieving my self-afflicted to-dos; so, just keep on doing, and when a question pops up with those publications, you know where to tutn to :-). Christian Stonecreek 13:41, 5 June 2022 (EDT)
Jules Verne has been on my plate for a few years now. I started with all the first editions and then as many translations as I could. A 'quick' break doing some non-fiction Asimov has taken about a year now, but I do hope to get back to populating a few of the missing editions in English and other languages. There is a German site I have my eye on. Christian, I may hold you to your offer, if you're still around when I get back to these. ../Doug H 22:07, 5 June 2022 (EDT)

Millennium Macabre

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=um+macab&type=All+Titles; I thought I'd found in that first entry a mostly empty record to enter stuff for until I realized the same item was entered in 2020 by someone else who apparently didn't notice it was already on ISFDB and filled in the details, but the review is with the empty one and also the American price. So empty one can probably be deleted if those things are moved over to the full record. --Username 10:04, 4 June 2022 (EDT)

Change "WatchDate" to "WatchPrePub"?

We have a "WatchDate" template and a linked cleanup report which help keep track of pub records with publication dates from questionable pre-publication sources. The template is currently found in 20 publication records.

Based on our experience with pre-publication data, it would be useful to have broadly similar functionality for questionable pre-publication covers. We could accomplish this goal by creating another template/cleanup report pair, but it's been suggested that creating a generic template/cleanup report pair for questionable pre-publication data would be a better long-term solution.

Here is the current proposal:

  • Create a new template, "WatchPrePub", as a replacement for "WatchDate".
  • The new template will be used for all types of "questionable pre-publication data".
  • The new template will take a parameter indicating which field's (or multiple fields') data is questionable.
  • The new template will expand to something like The following data is based on questionable pre-publication information and may be incorrect: [parameter, e.g. "publication date" or "cover and publication date"].
  • The linked cleanup report, which currently displays the publication title and the publication date, will have a "Questionable Field(s)" column added. It will also let editors re-sort the table by publication name, by publication date or by field name similar to the way the Publication Series page works.

What do you think? Ahasuerus 11:23, 4 June 2022 (EDT)

Hearing no objection, I have created FR 1506, "Generalize WatchDate to be WatchPrePub". Ahasuerus 13:22, 9 June 2022 (EDT)
Thanks. ErsatzCulture 17:34, 9 June 2022 (EDT)

Rites of Passage

Vault of Evil has a lot of small-press covers not on ISFDB including this Obelesk anthology, but after uploading it the .jpg, [4], which says "rites1" when downloading, includes that other unrelated cover. So before adding it to the record, how to go about editing it so only Rites cover shows? --Username 11:19, 5 June 2022 (EDT)

You can load it into an image editor (e.g., on Windows, you can use MS Paint) and crop it to contain just the half you want, save that, and upload it. In the notes expand the "uploaded by" notes to document the original source and to state that it has been cropped to remove a second, irrelevant cover. --MartyD 07:30, 6 June 2022 (EDT)

Brazilian Galactica

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=guerra+dos+d&type=All+Titles; Brazilian title is a reprint of English-language Battlestar Galactica novelization, War of the Gods, but editor didn't link it to original novel or make it part of the B.G. series. Also, the cover credits another author than the one in the English edition; Resnick wrote a different Galactica novel. On a tangential note, that Van Vogt translation with the same title has a cover artist but no cover art; Amazon seems not to have it but Spanish-language sites have a lovely cover, which may be the right one for this edition. EDIT: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2909468; translates as living legend, which is already on ISFDB in English-language edition. --Username 14:11, 5 June 2022 (EDT)

Edit History Needs Editing

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pub_history.cgi?312013; Just before I was going to see if anything needed fixing using Archive.org's copy of this zine, I noticed the first entry in "edit history" is missing a field and another field is in the wrong place. I guess someone knows what's up with that. --Username 17:55, 6 June 2022 (EDT)

Checking the database, I see that this is one of 80 "approved" submissions which do not have the approver's name or the time of approval recorded. Based on the dates when they were created -- between 2010 and 2013 -- these submissions errored out half way through the approval process. At the time, we didn't have a mechanism for catching these types of errors and our submission display software doesn't display them correctly. I will create a new bug report and fix the issue once I am done with the bug that I am currently working on. Thanks for reporting the problem. Ahasuerus 21:55, 6 June 2022 (EDT)

EDIT: Also, I had a cover replacement for the Headline PB edition of Alone With the Horrors rejected earlier (it wasn't as clear as the earlier one, which I should have noticed) and another edit was just approved, but there's 2 of the same cover artists now. I don't know what the trail is but something went wrong, so if someone can trace and delete whichever's necessary; http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?36880. --Username 17:55, 6 June 2022 (EDT)

Done.Rudam 01:51, 7 June 2022 (EDT)

Proposal: change "AK Mulford" to "A. K. Mulford"

AK Mulford currently has a couple of self-published novels in the database. The Amazon UK preview of the physical version of one of those novels confirms they use(d...) that form of their name, with no full stops after the initials.

Today it was announced those novels plus a bunch of others had been picked up by a trad publisher, with the self-pub ebook versions already being replaced by versions from the new publisher. Per the Amazon preview, these have "A. K. Mulford" on the cover and title page, although the "AK Mulford" version of the name still appears on the copyright page, FWIW.

The author's site also uses the "A. K." form (mostly - the value in the HTML title tag is AK"), but I suspect that may be a recent change to match the new editions.

My understanding of the rules is that we try to follow the author's preference regarding how their initials are recorded. However, I don't ever recall seeing variant names to cover both "A. B. C." and "ABC" forms, so I assume the rules are just to standardize on one form or the other? If that's correct, does anyone object to switching this author from "AK Mulford" to "A. K. Mulford", updating the titles and pubs accordingly, and adding appropriate notes to document when/where the older form was used? ErsatzCulture 18:16, 8 June 2022 (EDT)

In the absence of any objections over the past ~2 weeks, I just went to update the author's name, but I'd forgotten that this is something that requires moderator privs :-( I've added an author note re. the name variants, but could a moderator do the honours please? Once the name has been updated, I'll go through all the old/existing pubs and add pub notes about the form of the name used on them, and then start on adding all the new ones. Thanks ErsatzCulture 11:55, 21 June 2022 (EDT)
Once there's an entry for "A. K. Mulford", we can variant those under "AK Mulford" to the "A. K. Mulford" name. Right now, there are no entries for any books under "A. K. Mulford", so the name shouldn't be changed right now. The canonical name is always the one with the most entries. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:37, 21 June 2022 (EDT)
There are a couple of different but related issues here:
1. There's nothing in the database for "A. K. Mulford" yet because I was waiting on any feedback here before entering them, to avoid unnecessary extra work. The 2 "AK Mulford" titles currently in the database have already been reissued as tradpub ebooks under the "A. K. Mulford" name, and per the article I linked, there are another 6-8 titles contracted, all of which will presumably be under the latter name. As such, right it's a "tie" which name is in wider use, but it won't be long before "A. K. Mulford" will be much more widely used.
2. I ended up hacking up a quick-and-dirty report [*], and (bugs permitting) there are no author entries in the database where we have both "J Doe"/"J. Doe" or "ABC Doe"/"A. B. C. Doe" canonical and pseudonym entries for different forms of starting initials. (There are a handful for the surname as just an initial, and one for a middle initial FWIW.) Whether this lack of variant entries for starting initials is just a coincidence, or some rule/standard that I hadn't seen formally defined, was again something I was hoping to get feedback on here. If it is indeed OK to have both "AK Mulford" and "A. K. Mulford" entries, then that makes this point moot, but given the lack of precedent, I'd prefer to have the nod that it is OK.
[* - which as is the way of things, has identified a few other unrelated author records in the database that needed cleaning up...] ErsatzCulture 19:06, 21 June 2022 (EDT)

Haunters of the Dark

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?67364; I made a minor edit for this, replacing Amazon "P" image with updated image, but that led to me noticing that while ISFDB says 11/2004, OL says 9/25/2007, goodreads.com says 12/1/2007, and Amazon says 12/1/2007 or 5/25/2008 depending on which country it's from. There doesn't seem to be any OCLC or LCCN for this, although there is a non-working OCLC link on the OL page, and I can't find any copies on eBay. I have a feeling it's vaporware, but can't be sure. So does anyone know more? EDIT: I just found this, https://www.philipjosefarmer.com/PJFnew-200710.htm, which complains about the multiple date changes. I'm almost positive this was never published now. --Username 10:44, 9 June 2022 (EDT)

Cover change was approved today, so just bumping this up so someone can chime in and this likely non-existent book can be deleted (which begs the question of why I was so dumb as to replace a cover for a book that probably will be gone soon, but whatever). EDIT: I just realized it won't be deleted, the date will just be changed to unpublished, so the image will remain. Go me. --Username 14:33, 15 June 2022 (EDT)
I've changed it to unpublished status. Thanks for digging into this one. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:29, 15 June 2022 (EDT)
OK. I think the notes you wrote didn't turn out the way you wanted, though. --Username 17:55, 15 June 2022 (EDT)
True, they did not. That's what I get for trying to use wiki markup instead of html. Fixed. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 12:42, 16 June 2022 (EDT)

Foundation's Edge

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5337513; There's already an OCLC link here, but I added another one which shows Whispers Press info at bottom while it's Doubleday up top. I have a feeling this will be rejected, so I'm mentioning it here so someone can look at it and accept or reject quickly. --Username 13:21, 9 June 2022 (EDT)

Blumlein

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?31280; I made an edit for something by Michael Blumlein recently, and I also found this, [5], which raises a few questions; the pub. date is later than what's on ISFDB, the page count is the same as the much later Dell edition, but not either Scream/Press edition, the artist is Timothy, not T.M. (although online photos suggest he's credited as T.M. in the book), and there's a Timothy Caldwell on ISFDB with 1 cover art credit a few years later and a Timothy M. Caldwell who wrote some poems around the same time as the artist was active, so they may all be the same person, although T.M. Caldwell's record includes a few much later short stories, so maybe that's a different Caldwell (EDIT: It was). Most odd, however, is the mention of Blumlein's forthcoming second novel, A Native Land; there is literally ZERO mention of him ever working on or publishing a book with that title online. I was never a fan of his even back 30-35 years ago when I read any and every horror book I could find, his work being much too intellectual for me, but I'm sure there are fans of his here who know more and may add or fix some stuff in his record. --Username 10:55, 10 June 2022 (EDT)

I'd guess the date of publication (Sep. '90) was taken from Amazon, where it's still stated. But that's the trouble of not documenting in the notes where the date is from. I'd think it'd be safe to change the date of publication according to your found source. Anyone disagreeing?
On Caldwell: I also do think the three are one and the same: all publications seem to belong to the 'slipstream' scene. Christian Stonecreek 13:17, 10 June 2022 (EDT)
I hope the date's changed, because it seems more likely a horror collection would be published close to Halloween. Also, I've found exactly one (1) other mention of A Native Land, https://archive.org/details/The_New_York_Review_Of_Science_Fiction_027_1990-11, where the review of The Brains of Rats notes that title as being mentioned in the author's note. So whether he scrapped it or one of his later novels is that work under a different title is a mystery. --Username 13:43, 10 June 2022 (EDT)

Stac(e)y Jaine McIntosh 2020 story "Lunar"

Stacy Jaine McIntosh has a single story "Lunar" from 2020 to their name. This is surely the same person as Stacey Jaine McIntosh, who has a story of the same name and year in their bibliography. However, the first Lunar story has no pubs listed for it, so I'm slightly perplexed how it exists. I have a vague recollection of seeing and reporting something similar before, and being told it was due to being reviewed, but I can't see that that is the case here? As such, I'm not sure if this is a case for merging/deleting or varianting the relevant records. ErsatzCulture 08:38, 12 June 2022 (EDT)

This usually does happen when you have or create a parent title and then relate the variant title to a different parent: the former parent has no publications anymore when there weren't any under it. So, it does seem the derelict title can be safely deleted. Christian Stonecreek 13:10, 12 June 2022 (EDT)
Thanks. In the absence of any other responses, I've now deleted the title record that had no pubs, and it looks like the offending author record has also been removed, as hoped/expected. ErsatzCulture 11:47, 21 June 2022 (EDT)

Sirius Confusion

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubs_not_in_series.cgi?28514; Do those recent zines really have any connection to the much earlier Sirius publisher? --Username 12:41, 12 June 2022 (EDT)

"Reviews" section of the Title page rewritten

The software that displays the "Reviews" section on the Title page has been rewritten and upgraded to handle the 4 permutations that reviews can create:

  • reviews of the displayed title
  • reviews of the displayed title's VTs
  • VTs of reviews of the displayed title
  • VTs of reviews of VTs of the displayed title

The software has also been modified to display the alternate names of the authors of reprints and their languages. If you come across any issues, please post the affected URL(s) here. Ahasuerus 19:06, 12 June 2022 (EDT)

Edit History bug fixed; submissions-related column headers clarified

The Edit History bug reported on June 6 has been fixed.

In addition, some column headers in submissions-related tables have been clarified. "Moderator" has been changed to "Reviewer" to account for self-approvers. "Time Reviewed" is now "Time Approved" or "Time Rejected" depending on the Web page. Ahasuerus 11:01, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

C. Cole ?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=c.+cole&type=Name; The 3 C. Cole (or Coles) Phillips (or Phllips) names probably need merging; same bio data is repeated between records. --Username 11:59, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

Alternate names created. Thanks for finding. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:09, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

WatchDate changed to WatchPrePub

As per FR 1506, "Generalize WatchDate to be WatchPrePub", the ISFDB template "WatchDate" has been retired. All of its occurrences in publication notes have been replaced with "WatchPrePub|Publication date". Help:Using Templates and HTML in Note Fields has been updated.

Please note that the associated cleanup report is currently empty. An updated list will become available on Sunday morning when the weekly reports run. Of course, you can always use Advanced Publication Search to look for "WatchPrePub" in the Notes field. Ahasuerus 15:59, 13 June 2022 (EDT)

Thanks. I've tagged a pub which still has a placeholder cover, so I'll check the report at the weekend to verify it shows up. ErsatzCulture 17:55, 13 June 2022 (EDT)
I've updated that one with the final cover per the distributor. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:25, 15 June 2022 (EDT)

Magazine Search bug fixed

Bug 637, "Magazine Search", has been fixed. If you come across unexpected behavior, please post your findings here. Ahasuerus 20:31, 14 June 2022 (EDT)

Macauley

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=macauley&type=Publisher; 12 in one, 26 in the other, none PV, same website linked in both. --Username 20:00, 15 June 2022 (EDT)

Cover art attributions, and Bob Haberfield

Surveying the cover art attributed on ISFDB to Bob Haberfield, I found the following anomalies: Seven attributions (for different art) based on bing.com searches. Three were based on Flickr, and one on a bookseller's opinion at abebooks.com.
Though I think that all of these covers are actually Haberfield's work, I think we should be a bit more critical. Guesses should not be presented as facts.
On the other hand, there are good sources for attributing most of these covers to Haberfield:
1) Michael Moorcock writes at the multiverse.org forum: "Actually I picked Bob Haberfield for the first Mayflower covers and he did my covers for quite a long time until he joined an asram and stopped doing commercial work."
Q: "The currently burning question remains, for me: who did the first few Mayflower photocollage covers; the original Stealer of Souls (red & green eye), Stormbringer (gritted teeth in stormy sky), and the first covers of the Runestaff series?"
Moorcock: "All those covers, Guy, were done by Haberfield. You'll find some of his photomontages in New Worlds, as well."
I'm going to interpret Moorcock's answers as a statement that all Moorcock's Mayflower covers for the period 1968-1976 are by Bob Haberfield. Stylistically, it also makes sense. With one exception, The Black Corridor had a gadget photo cover. And then in 1977, there appeared a Rodney Matthews cover, ending Haberfield's reign.
2) Haberfield showed 32 images of (mostly) cover art on a site which disappeared years ago, but can partly still be found at archive.org. Alas, the next two pages have no images. But I've made a reconstruction using saved images and uploaded the second page here. The third page had only two currently irrelevant images.
I intend to refer to this statement for quite a few cover art credit changes and/or note modifications, so add your comments here please. Horzel 05:36, 17 June 2022 (EDT)

At the moment the multiverse.org forum seems to suffer from an invalid security certificate. But archive.org has a copy. Horzel 15:14, 29 June 2022 (EDT)

Changing Canonical name to Ishmael A. Soledad from Ishmael Soledad

Any objections to making Ishmael A. Soledad the canonical name and Ishmael Soledad the alternate? Even his twitter page uses the middle initial. Thanks, John Scifibones 11:47, 17 June 2022 (EDT)

None noted; Done John Scifibones 11:42, 22 June 2022 (EDT)

Weinkauf

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=weinkauf&type=Name; Same person? --Username 15:56, 17 June 2022 (EDT)

Tombs of Gold

https://archive.org/details/DonSturdyInTheTombsOfGold/appleton-v-don-1925-BK000556/; All of the Tarzan books published by Grosset and Dunlap's division, Madison Square, have no covers here, but I found one on Amazon, then found another on Archive.org, Golden Lion, from an account devoted to JEWELRY. While doing so I saw another book, Don Sturdy in the Tombs of Gold, which looks like it belongs here, but there's only 2 Don Sturdy books here and that isn't one of them. So maybe someone knows why that is; maybe the mummies are fake like in Scooby-Doo? Or maybe it's just that nobody ever decided to enter it. --Username 09:36, 18 June 2022 (EDT)

Queefrotica

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?452132; 3 Germans PV this, and today I came across a highly embarrassing book here which includes words like "Whispering Gash"; the point is that the cover is credited to Elena Helfreicht (I added that info plus the cover image), not Helfrecht as in the book above, which seems to have no Amazon Look Inside but typing artist's name and book's ISBN on Google got exactly 1 hit from one of those highly suspect sites where they dump e-books; however, it does seem to prove that it is actually Helfrecht in Chiang's book, and her website also says Helfrecht. Judging by her name I assume she's German, so maybe PV will know whether she worked on any other books. Also, does Chiang's book have an English-language edition not entered here or was it German-only? --Username 12:02, 18 June 2022 (EDT)

The Illustrated Dracula

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1739936; This review points to a 30-years-later book with the same title, but the book it's supposed to be linked to, from Manor Books with an intro by C. Lee, just had a cover uploaded to the Wiki, so that might need looking at to get everything connected where they should be. --Username 08:38, 19 June 2022 (EDT)

Burroughs Length

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?184537; I'm afraid to ask about this, knowing how angry people can get about determining lengths, but none of the page counts for the 3 novels in this book are long enough for a novel. Abridged, or some other explanation? The original 1924 edition is nearly 200 pages longer. No Archive copy of this edition that I can see, and all 3 PV are long-gone. --Username 12:41, 19 June 2022 (EDT)

The OCLC entry lists 141 copies in the United States (and 1 in Australia). Maybe someone has access to one of these libraries. (P.S. none in Canada or near me) ../Doug H 15:34, 19 June 2022 (EDT)

Entering Correct Short Stories by Luigi Pirandello

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Dirk_P_Broer#Pirandello.27s_Short_Stories; As it says, I stumbled on the fact that the edition entered here was another one entirely. Judging by the response he ain't gonna fix what he broke, so if anyone wants to bother, go ahead. I don't enter translated stories, having enough trouble dealing with English. --Username 19:58, 19 June 2022 (EDT)

Irving Heine - (possibly) questioned pseudonym

SFE have just added a page for "Irving Heine" and state "Unidentified and perhaps pseudonymous author (probably UK), long thought to be one of the many Pseudonyms of Denis Hughes..." The entry here is an alternate name for Denis Hughes. Given that SFE don't seem to be 100% convinced this is a pseudonym, how should this be reflected here - is adding an author note sufficient to cover this? I've had a quick skim of the the help pages for alternate authors, and don't see anything that covers "believed to be" scenarios. ErsatzCulture 16:24, 20 June 2022 (EDT)

I would use an author note and not create an alternate name. -- JLaTondre (talk) 18:21, 20 June 2022 (EDT)
The question about "believed to be" pseudonyms may be open.
But Irving Heine is a "believed to be" that SFE4 has retracted. See my AuthorUpdate submission 5349912.
Somehow I achieved four consecutive submissions to the point, 5349912–15. --Pwendt|talk 18:34, 26 June 2022 (EDT)
Irving Heine and E. R. Royce are two names known only as credited authors of one work each. SFE formerly reported them as pseudonyms of Denis Hughes, retracted recently and ten years ago. The alternate names and parent titles are now "undone" here, with new or updated publication, title, and author notes. Now our alternate names for Hughes correspond to the 19 pseudonyms and house names that SFE4 currently lists for his sf writings. --Pwendt|talk 10:53, 24 July 2022 (EDT)

Abortion Stories

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?307797; Copy uploaded to Archive.org last month; rare book, WorldCat has only 2 University copies and 1 Library of Congress copy, so this is very welcome. I assume the upload was made to capitalize on the recent pro-life ruling. Anyway, that "Order of the Virgin Mothers" is a story but was reprinted in a book of plays, and looking at Google's copy it is a play. So I think they need separating. --Username 18:34, 20 June 2022 (EDT)

Display of cover images on submission review pages tweaked

The software that displays cover images on submission review pages -- New Publication, Edit Publication, Merge COVERART Titles, Variant COVERART Title, etc -- has been fixed to produce valid HTML. For cover images associated with existing publication records, you can still go to the pub record by clicking the image. If you notice anything unusual, please post your findings here. Ahasuerus 15:01, 23 June 2022 (EDT)

"Adult" Fantastic Fiction

https://www.ffadultsonly.com/; Part of fantasticfiction.com, but when I tried to replace cover here, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?875156, I got yellow warning about non-ISFDB site. Did anyone ever ask about whether this sister site could be made ISFDB-friendly like its parent? Also, while cancelling my edit, I noticed that the note about Levinson possibly being the author seems to be wrong, since it was reprinted as part of the Gardner Francis Fox Library, https://www.gardnerfrancisfoxlibrary.com/cherry-delight-27-man-who-was-god-glen-chase-gardner-f-fox. --Username 09:43, 24 June 2022 (EDT)

They Return At Evening

https://www.etsy.com/listing/771875662/first-edition-they-return-at-evening; I couldn't find a clear photo of contents page so I could enter page #'s but that Etsy link shows it's H.R., not H. Russell. His record here is a mess, with many title and name variants, some like these probably a mistake, so someone with access to most or all of his collections in their various editions could probably do a major clean-up. I left a note on the page of the editor who entered these under the wrong name, but I don't hold out much hope for him doing anything about it. EDIT: He did something about it. --Username 21:35, 25 June 2022 (EDT)

Chris Curry / Tamara Thorne

https://www.thehorrorzine.com/Fiction/July2022/TamaraThorne/TamaraThorne.html; The Horror Zine publishes online monthly and includes a story from a genre veteran but doesn't usually mention when they're reprints, which is most of the time. "The Lady Who Lost Her Head" is on ISFDB from Grue Magazine in 1987 as by Chris Curry. There's no mention that they're the same person, and so that story and those other Curry works all need variants now, right? EDIT: Thorne says 1957 but Curry says 1954; another problem. --Username 17:29, 28 June 2022 (EDT)

French Soul Catcher

https://archive.org/details/lepreneurdames0000herb; I did some edits for English-language editions of Frank Herbert's book but noticed this French edition which seems to be earlier than the one on ISFDB, in case any French-fluent editors want to enter it. EDIT: Also, https://archive.org/details/dunetome100pock, whose ISBN only matches much later editions from a different publisher but uses the same cover art and has the later publisher's name on the cover (?). It's also stamped Sausalito Public Library, so apparently there was a thirst for French-language editions of Dune in California at some point. --Username 20:38, 29 June 2022 (EDT)

David St. Clair

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?4619; He wrote a lot of dopey non-fiction books in the 70s and 80s about psychic powers and exorcisms and whatnot, but the etsy.com page I just found for his 1989 book Bloodline says he's turning his hand to fiction. Mine to Kill's Corgi ed., https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/91790613, says "true account" on the cover and the cover of The Devil Rocked Her Cradle on ISFDB also says "account". They're non-fiction (although the Bart ed. of Mine To Kill on ISFDB has different copy on the cover that tries to make it look like a novel) and so probably should be deleted; he's certainly not above-the-threshold. --Username 08:55, 1 July 2022 (EDT)

Reviews by Dave Langford (alternate name)

The summary bibliography for alternate name Dave Langford lists more than 100 Reviews.

And it does not display the note "Alternate Name. See: David Langford (or view all titles published using this alternate name)" that I expect to see.

Meanwhile, for David Langford, I see no way to "toggle" from the default view to one that lists only works we know to be published under that canonical name. Is that a feature we have lost? or (more likely, yes, of course) a phantom memory of some years-ago wishful thought? --Pwendt|talk 13:18, 1 July 2022 (EDT)

When all titles under a pseudonym are already varianted to the canonical name, the page remains empty of titles and the software will display "Alternate Name. See: David Langford (or view all titles published using this alternate name)". If there are still titles not yet varianted, as with all these White Dwarf reviews, it will display only "Used As Alternate Name By: David Langford", so all these reviews will need to be varianted to David Langford. AFAICR I think it has always been this way. ;) PeteYoung 09:23, 2 July 2022 (EDT)
That's right. Spot checking some of the "Dave Langford" reviews, I see that they come from recently entered "White Dwarf" issues, e.g. White Dwarf, December 1984, which was entered on 2022-05-08. They just need to be varianted. Ahasuerus 12:04, 2 July 2022 (EDT)

Science Fiction Encyclopedia Links

I have been working on this project, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/edit/sfe3_authors.cgi. About half of the original task is done but many of the remaining entries are matches on pseudonyms and I am not sure what is the best way to process them, if at all. swfritter 16:15, 1 July 2022 (EDT)

SFE's pseudonym stubs can still be useful as sources of pseudonym attribution, so I would link them on our side. If we have the same pseudonym on file, then I would add its SFE link under the pseudonym record. If we don't have the pseudonym -- which can happen for non-genre pseudonyms -- I would add it to the canonical name. Ahasuerus 12:19, 2 July 2022 (EDT)
That was my inclination. It is kind of nice to see items disappear from the list after they have been processed.--swfritter 16:15, 3 July 2022 (EDT)
Keep in mind that, as the report header says, "this report lets moderators ignore SFE author URLs." Once you have a list of SFE author pages which we don't need to link to, please feel free to post it here and a moderator will "ignore" them. Ahasuerus 21:47, 3 July 2022 (EDT)

Meanwhile, I am taking a little Covid break. Not severe, but I definitely have a little Covid fog.--swfritter 16:15, 1 July 2022 (EDT)

Sorry to hear that! Hopefully things will get better soon and it won't have any side effects. Ahasuerus 12:19, 2 July 2022 (EDT)
Just on the subject of that report, could it be extended to look for SFE links associated with records other than authors? This link is currently at #1633 in the list, and I'd added it to the relevant series page ages ago, but it still shows up in the report. I guess non-author SFE pages are less important to get in the database, but it would seem preferable to add them where relevant, rather than mark them as ignored, I'd have thought?
(Although I do note that the SFE link on this series page - which I'd previously moved from an author page to the series, as the author/editor in question now has a proper SFE page - doesn't show on the report, so maybe things are more complicated than I thought? ErsatzCulture 13:02, 2 July 2022 (EDT)
There are a couple of things to consider here.
First, the ISFDB/SFE reconciliation report is supposed to be rebuilt nightly by scanning the SFE categories listed on this SFE page of "people" categories: artist, author, critic, etc. Their full list of categories includes awards, comics, fandom-related entries, films, games, etc. Once we catch up with the "people" categories, we can explore other categories. "Award" looks particularly promising. "Game" may also be of interest since we have quite a few fiction series based on game worlds.
Second, SFE's recent (October 2021) migration from HTTP to HTTPS required certain software changes on our side. Some were easy to implement, but others can't be put into effect until we upgrade our server. This means that we are working with an out of date version of SFE's data. (We'll be able to catch up once our server migration is finished.) Since I don't see https://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/star_trek_picard listed as part of a "people category", I assume that it comes from an older version of the SFE data. Ahasuerus 15:49, 2 July 2022 (EDT)

Red Skel(e)ton

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?326759; Someone uploaded a copy of this anthology to Archive.org in 2015; the first author's last name was misspelled, and Supernatural Index where contents were entered from by previous editor spells it properly, so I assume it was just a mistake and I fixed it. More importantly, the title page seems to suggest the title should be Red Skeleton (or maybe Red Skel(e)ton), and it is Skeleton in many places on the web; what do you think? Also, there is much (creepy) interior art; does anyone know if it's also by the cover artist? --Username 11:32, 4 July 2022 (EDT)

I think it should be "Skeleton". Note that LOC has it that way. Also, if you look at the scan, both the title page and the running headers spell it Skeleton with the second "e" slightly lighter and dropped a bit, but still clearly "Skeleton". --MartyD 11:52, 4 July 2022 (EDT)

Yellow Mark

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5352499; Does anyone know if that URL can be fixed in order not to display that warning? I entered the other Sunset book by Jakes, Brak, with an Amazon cover that's not so good but at least there was one, but this audiobook's cover could only be found by me on Goodreads and it does start with an Amazon URL but mod apparently doesn't agree, although there are countless cover images on ISFDB with the same warning and yet their covers still display properly. I prefer to save uploading covers to Wiki for rare books, or those with badly scanned or damaged covers, neither of which applies in this case. --Username 11:53, 4 July 2022 (EDT)

I suggest you ping Ahasuerus. It could be the validator needs a little tweaking. It probably doesn't like the periods in the "compressed.photo.goodreads.com" part -- usually periods separate Amazon's formatting directives -- but that's just a Male Answer Syndrome WAG. --MartyD 18:43, 4 July 2022 (EDT)
Our software currently recognizes one stable pattern for Amazon-hosted "S" image URLs: *.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/ followed by 26 letters or digits and ending with ".gif", ".png" or ".jpg".
The "S" URL linked above is "images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327999593i/9621932.jpg", which is very different from what's expected. Do we know if this pattern is supported by Amazon? Ahasuerus 18:54, 4 July 2022 (EDT)
The link does work. I have never seen one like it. I spent a little quality Google time trying to find an alternative Amazon path for it, but I was unsuccessful. --MartyD 07:19, 5 July 2022 (EDT)
Oh, I know that it works, I am just wondering if it's officially supported. We've run into stability issues with unsupported Amazon URLs in the past -- "here today, gone tomorrow". Ahasuerus 09:00, 5 July 2022 (EDT)

"Publications with Invalid Page Numbers" updated

The cleanup report "Publications with Invalid Page Numbers" has been updated to look for invalid values after the pipe character. Once the report is rerun tomorrow morning, it should list 388 publications. Ahasuerus 12:32, 5 July 2022 (EDT)

2022-07-05 -- server problems

The ISFDB server is currently experiencing system issues and "leaking" disk space. It appears to be the same problem that we ran into a couple of months ago and that had to be fixed by the hosting company. At the rate things are going, we will run out of space within a couple of hours.

I have notified Al and hope that the issue will be resolved later today. Ahasuerus 12:35, 5 July 2022 (EDT)

The server finally ran out of disk space around 5:30am this morning. The hosting company fixed the issue a few minutes ago. Everything should be back up. Please post here if you come across any problems. Ahasuerus 10:08, 6 July 2022 (EDT)

$5.95

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Username#The_Summer_Meadows; Can someone look at this and approve my edit? I'm tired of arguing. --Username 17:01, 6 July 2022 (EDT)

It was approved very soon after I wrote this, but I think that was just in the normal run of things, not as a result of my message. I'm still curious about whether I was imagining things, or does anyone else see what I saw? There's no Delacorte PB and searching Google's copy brings up $5.95, right? --Username 12:58, 7 July 2022 (EDT)
I saw the $5.95, but I wouldn't have been able to figure out that the snippet was showing the price from a flap. FWIW, a Google shows plenty of resellers calling it a hardcover, as well as a Reginald bibliography on Google Books calling it "cloth". An entry on AbeBooks calls it hardcover, talks about the dust jacket condition, and has some pictures, although the pictures do not include anything that definitively show the format. So, given all of that, it seems likely Google Books' metadata is mistaken. --MartyD 10:39, 8 July 2022 (EDT)
I happen to agree that $5.95 is the price for the hardcover. I agree because of information provided subsequent to the edit. However, the publication note still says only 'Price found in search of Google Books copy. I find that statement incomplete at best. Note, I did not reject it, I released it so another moderator could review it. John Scifibones 11:14, 8 July 2022 (EDT)
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/21/archives/new-novel-by-leland-frederick-cooley-607-pp-new-york-avon-paper-175.html; https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/01/archives/a-listing-of-recently-published-books-fiction-general.html. Yes, $5.95 IS the price of the hardcover. There's 2 mentions of it linked above. I saw those first, didn't want to enter 2 links, and found the price in the Google copy, which is preferable because I'm sure the New York Times was just as capable of wrong info as anyone else, but when you see $5.95 in print on an actual scan of a physical copy when you do a search on Google, you can't dispute that; pics don't lie. If you'd like to add those 2 Times links to the record so it's more complete, you're free to do that. --Username 11:30, 8 July 2022 (EDT)

John Farris birthdate

It was pointed out on Twitter that ISFDB has today as a birthdate for him, but Wikipedia (and also IMDB) has the 26th. I looked through the Wikipedia history and talk pages, but couldn't see anything that might explain the discrepancy, other than the possibility of confusion with a different John Farris, but that one doesn't have any DOB info on Wikipedia, so that doesn't seem an especially likely explanation.

Does anyone know any more about this author, or is it something that will just have to be acknowledged in the note, but leaving the DOB field as-is. Having a month and day-of-month of the same number makes me suspect the data here is more likely to be incorrect (e.g. typo or date format mismatch), but I don't think that's enough to justify changing the value in the field. ErsatzCulture 14:23, 7 July 2022 (EDT)

The Prezi page says "Born July seventh, 1936". Judging by the edit history, that page is likely the source for our date. See [6]. The "blackleatherrequired" site only has/had 1936. Searching on https://www.missouribirthindex.com/ for Farris between 1935 and 1937 give "JOHN LEE FARRIS 07/26/1936". While that's not an official Missouri government site, it looks fairly authoritative to me. --MartyD 10:23, 8 July 2022 (EDT)
Thanks for doing way more detective work than I could even have considered! I've updated the author record, adding a note about the contrary date in the Prezi. ErsatzCulture 16:52, 11 July 2022 (EDT)

Long Dash

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?24550; Not merged like they should be because of that dumb dash being entered 2 different ways. --Username 15:21, 7 July 2022 (EDT)

Why Don't They Just Use Words?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?119003; So it turns out this dude, Brian Ames, wrote a ton of fiction including much that's not on ISFDB because it was published in literary/online zines, and had a weird old site, tendollardog.com, with a huge list (last archived link in 2009) of his works, so I'm going to add it here soon. I added links to 2 stories from mytholog.com, apparently a popular site once that ended in 2007 but is still archived online, but I just couldn't find that reprint of his All Hallows story "Several Appearances of Stuart" in Whispering Spirits, another once-popular online site that published PDF's of each issue, it seems, but changed their bloody URL so many times (Ralan says their old defunct site was whisperingghosts.com, which is weird because that's NOT THE TITLE OF THE MAGAZINE), including a Geocities site and a domain called dragynspice.com (*puke*). If anyone can extract any stories beyond the scant couple I found on Archive.org and can locate Ames' story, that would be great. The issue here, though, is that 1 of his stories was written using the old "write the title using graphics" BS, and in this case his 2002 story with the random symbols for a title was reprinted in his 2004 collection, but whoever entered it here decided to title it "grey blob". Now, I was going to variant, but changed my mind. So would anyone like to decide which title is more suitable and merge or whatever is needed? If you hover over the 2002 title it says "Circle with Vertical Fill". --Username 19:07, 8 July 2022 (EDT)

Blue Star

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/publisher.cgi?28465; I added a sweet Amazon cover for the Moorcock book and decided to enter publisher's address since it's in a photo; that 2021 book obviously isn't the same as the 70's books, but all I see in every edition on Amazon is Crystal Star. So if anyone can actually find a title page that says Blue Star it could be changed in some way to differ it from the old publisher; if not, it just needs changing to Crystal Star. --Username 14:00, 9 July 2022 (EDT)

Peter (Andrew) Jones

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?26793; These are orphaned because editors didn't variant titles and name to Peter Jones, but it's not a guarantee that all are by the same Peter Jones, being a very common name, so if anyone knows for sure about any of them they should be made variants. --Username 10:41, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

While Peter Jones is a common name, Peter Andrew Jones is less common. Peter Jones is our canonical name for Peter Andrew Jones so extremely likely anything under Peter Andrew Jones is the same Jones. All the covers are consistent with Jones' style as well. I have varianted them. -- JLaTondre (talk) 12:23, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

"Publications with Invalid Prices" tweaked

The cleanup report "Publications with Invalid Prices" has been tweaked to ignore legal prices like "£0.075" and "$0.125". Ahasuerus 13:16, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

2022-07-10 -- more server problems

The disk space "leak" which we ran into on July 5/6 is back. At the current rate we will run out of disk space in a few hours. I have contacted Al. Ahasuerus 13:18, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

7:15pm update. We are still leaking disk space, although slower than this morning. At this rate the server may run out of space either overnight or tomorrow morning. Ahasuerus 19:18, 10 July 2022 (EDT)
After a couple of rocky hours between 4am and 5:30am, things seem to be back to normal. Fingers crossed. Ahasuerus 05:52, 11 July 2022 (EDT)

"My Pending/Recently Approved/Rejected/Errored Out" lists tweaked

The following Web pages:

have been limited to the last 3 months for performance reasons. We may be able to lift these restrictions once we upgrade the database engine. Ahasuerus 19:16, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

For me the report "My Pending Edits" is suddenly empty --a change this hour, or nearly so-- without new listings atop "My Recent Edits".
The current number of pending edits by all editors (not held by a moderator) is 431, up from 426. --Pwendt|talk 19:20, 10 July 2022 (EDT)
Address bar displays ~/cgi-bin/myrecent.cgi?0+N (Pending) or ~/cgi-bin/myrecent.cgi?0+I (Recent). --Pwendt|talk 19:22, 10 July 2022 (EDT)
Let me take a look... Ahasuerus 19:38, 10 July 2022 (EDT)
Fixed. The 3 month limit should only apply to the "My Recent Edits" page from now on. Thanks for reporting the problem! Ahasuerus 19:49, 10 July 2022 (EDT)

Russian Warren

https://fantlab.ru/art1391; I've been adding edits for various Jim Warren-related things, and that page lists a bunch of Russian books with his art, but many of the covers I recognize from other books, or, in the case of that "pair of eyes with a woman's face on top" cover, from the poster of the G. Romero/D. Argento 1990 anthology film Two Evil Eyes. All the English-language covers are credited on ISFDB, but several edits could probably be made from the Russian ones for people fluent in that language. The 1996 cover is from Stuart Friedman's Maniac, for example, while the first 1997 cover uses the hourglass art from R. Karl Largent's Black Death, but the woman in the background isn't on that cover, so maybe they stole from multiple covers at the same time for some of these books, although she appears on the back cover, too, so maybe she was some kind of Russian horror personality or something (poor late Richard Laymon is also on the back cover, with a photo that couldn't look any less scary for a horror author). A bonus is that some of these Russian entries include American covers that aren't elsewhere on FantLab, with some including the original art used for the covers. I have no idea why the Deathwalker cover keeps appearing under Stephen King's books, though. --Username 14:10, 11 July 2022 (EDT)

FantLab editors have done a great deal of work figuring out which artists' art has been "reused without permission" by Russian publishers. For example, consider this 2003 translation of David Zindell's The Lightstone. The cover is a fusion of paintings originally produced by Mónica Pasamón, Jerry Vanderstelt and Donald Clavette. It's a headache to sort out... Ahasuerus 14:54, 11 July 2022 (EDT)

Elvis Is Alive!

"John Farris' 2004 collection from Babbage Press, [84], is rare, with only 2 copies on Worldcat. I ordered it from interlibrary loan a few years ago so it definitely exists, but I noticed it had no page #'s entered on ISFDB, and couldn't find anywhere online that shows the contents page so I could enter them. However, in searching I stumbled across the fact that it was reprinted under a different title in 2020, https://www.amazon.com/No-Sin-Unpunished-John-Farris-ebook/dp/B08G892JNN. So anyone with an Amazon account who can access the entire e-book may want to enter all the info on ISFDB; there's a few stories in there that are hard to find anywhere else. Also, if anyone owns the Babbage edition (HA!) it would be good to enter the page #'s, too." The above was cut-and-pasted from a message I left sometime last year (I knew I had written about this book before but couldn't find it until I searched for the title), and today after seeing John Farris' birth date fixed by others here I decided to do some edits for his books, which surprisingly are still missing many editions/have incorrect or missing info. While doing so I came across a single copy of Elvisland on eBay, with a welcome photo of the contents page, so I've entered the page #'s. However, in typical Babbage fashion their proofreading was crap, and the next-to-last story has a page # lower than the story preceding it. Also, WorldCat had a page count much lower than entered here, and an ancient review on sfsite.com agreed, so I fixed that, too. So now someone needs to verify from an actual copy if all the page #'s and the page count are correct. Anyone? No Sin Unpunished hasn't been entered by anyone yet, either, and I see that 1 story from 2005, "Bloody Mary Morning", was not in Elvisland and the title story seems to be original. EDIT: I saw on IMDB that Farris was involved in a movie 2 or 3 years ago titled No Sin Unpunished which was based on his story "Horrorshow", so if anyone enters the e-book they should check to see if it's mentioned anywhere that the title story is not original but simply a retitling of that old story. --Username 21:30, 11 July 2022 (EDT)

Bad Voltage

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?6372; I just made some edits moving Potter's credit over to the second entry, replaced the unstable cover image, fixed dates, etc., so there's really no need for the first entry anymore. Not sure why it was entered because other entry was done in 2007, a couple of years earlier. --Username 13:50, 12 July 2022 (EDT)

Goldsteins

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=goldstein&type=Name; Steve, Steven L. and Steven Lawrence Goldstein all seem to be the same guy. --Username 18:03, 12 July 2022 (EDT)

Return of the Living Dead

https://archive.org/search.php?query=return-of-the-living-dead%20russo&and[]=mediatype%3A%22texts%22; Someone uploaded that Hamlyn edition a few days ago, but in Hamlyn's typical fashion there's no indication of what printing it is; they just liked releasing the same book with different covers. I'm sure Brit PB experts will know. Also, that Undead book revealed the sweet cover art credit on the back cover, so I entered that in the e-book edition (TP was never entered here). More importantly, I saw here, https://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/2325/return-living-dead, the suggestion that Russo re-wrote the book after the 1985 film version came out, so that version may be a novelization, but writers at that Vault link seem confused about whether the Hamlyn edition with the cover recently uploaded was the rewritten version or whether it was the Arrow edition, and both the Hamlyn on ISFDB and the Arrow have the same page count, which seems unlikely if he re-wrote the book. So there might be some further investigation needed. --Username 19:12, 12 July 2022 (EDT)

Rewrite of submission review pages underway

The way the ISFDB software displays submission review pages is a holdover from an earlier era. The code is convoluted and inefficient, which makes it hard to add new features or fix existing problems.

I am currently in the middle of a rewrite which will require multiple patches to complete. If you see submission review pages behaving in wrong or unusual ways, please post your findings here. Ahasuerus 10:08, 13 July 2022 (EDT)

I just tried to edit the DAW publisher page (see item below) and on clicking submit on the edit page, I'm linked to [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/mod/submission_review.cgi?5363605 which just says "Moderator privileges are required for this option". (NB: this is just to submit an edit, not to self-approve it.) Sidebar says I'm logged in as me. (This was around 15:45 BST (GMT+1) if you need to trace any logs) ErsatzCulture 10:49, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
EDIT: I see that my 2 attempts to submit this (5363603 & 5363605) do appear in my Pending Edits page, so the edits have been accepted, and (presumably) submission_review.cgi is bombing out after that point. If I click on one of those edits, I can see the detail (view_submission.cgi), but when I click on the self-approver view link, I go to submission_review.cgi and the same error as previously mentioned. ErsatzCulture 11:03, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
Thanks, investigating... Ahasuerus 11:23, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
I have patched the code. Could you please give it another try and see if it fixed the problem? Ahasuerus 11:44, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
I've just submitted a new version of the edit to the DAW page, and was able to accept it as part of the regular self-approver workflow.
Something that I only just noticed, is that there seems/seemed to be some weirdness with the diffing logic on view_submission.cgi. If you go to http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5363605 , it doesn't show any changes. DON'T CLICK ON THE XML LINK FOR THAT EDIT!! If you look at my slightly earlier attempt at that edit http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5363603 it was also not showing any changes. However, I clicked on the XML view to see if that had my edits, which it did, but when I went back to the submission view, those changes were now showing in the diff. I assume there's something behind-the-scenes that explains that, and presumably the lack of anyone else reporting problems means this hasn't had wide impact, but editors, especially self-approvers, might want to double check their edits have been properly processed? ErsatzCulture 11:58, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
This is odd. Submission review pages and "Raw XML dump" pages are not supposed to affect each other; they load data directly from the database. I have looked at the linked submissions and couldn't see the differences between the view_submission.cgi representation of the data and the dumpxml.cgi representation. I am not sure what could be responsible for the behavior that you described :-( Ahasuerus 12:11, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
It looks like my second submission lost my edits (due to somewhat-known back button behaviour on edit pages), which would explain how things look right now. Hopefully this is all solved - I've done a couple of AddPubs in the mean time, and they were both fine. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ErsatzCulture (talk • contribs) .

DAW ownership

DAW has just been bought out by a Chinese publisher - paywalled PW story PR statement in Twitter thread. Whilst reading up on the background behind this, I note that the publisher note states "DAW is currently a division of Penguin Group (USA)". Whilst I might have edited that to switch to the past tense, as far as I can tell, that's isn't/wasn't a true statement?

  • Wikipedia says "Although it has a distribution relationship with Penguin Group and is headquartered in Penguin USA's offices in New York City, DAW is editorially independent and closely held by its current publishers, Betsy Wollheim (Donald's daughter) and Sheila E. Gilbert."
  • The acquisition statement linked above also says they were a private company & were "partnered with and distributed by PRH"

Anyone care to edit that note accordingly? (As someone on the other side of the Atlantic from where DAW operates, I don't feel knowledgeable enough about them to change things.) FWIW The bit about them being a division of Penguin seems to have been in since before 2010/the edit history records. ErsatzCulture 10:33, 13 July 2022 (EDT)

I suspect that "partnered with" can cover a variety of arrangements. I also note that the press release quoted by Tor says:
  • ...we will be the sole SFF imprint of their company (a first for DAW).
which seems to suggest that they considered themselves a Penguin "imprint" prior to being purchased by Astra Publishing.
Given this ambiguous language, I think we'll want to quote the sources of our information about the prior ownership structure explicitly. Ahasuerus 12:01, 13 July 2022 (EDT)
I've now expanded the note in the DAW entry to reword the stuff about the Penguin relationship, and to add that Betsy Wollheim & Sheila Gilbert had been running it after the senior Wollheims, and to note the Astra buyout. More than happy if someone else wants to take a crack at tweaking it further. ErsatzCulture 12:27, 16 July 2022 (EDT)

Bill Gates

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?150983; I remember adding that appropriate photo a long time ago, but today came across this randomly and the name seems weird. Why is there a period after the III, and shouldn't III be after the other names? --Username 13:02, 13 July 2022 (EDT)

Richard Powers Portuguese Cover?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?16229; I imported the Galaxy edition's cover art to the 2 Wildside editions, but that Regresso edition clearly uses some of it while adding a stupid-looking green bird or whatever that is. So I don't know if Powers' credit belongs in that, too. --Username 17:47, 13 July 2022 (EDT)

Psychos Page Count

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?35077; I've been replacing unstable covers for Robert Bloch books and the HC edition of this has just been replaced with a cover that actually looks a lot better, but I think I recall asking about the page count some time ago; is the HC really much lower than the Pocket editions or is HC the same and someone got the wrong info from some website? Someone here may own a copy. --Username 13:51, 14 July 2022 (EDT)

PLEASE upgrade ISFDB to SSL meaning https:

Hi... I don't know where else to post this... I'm John T. Cullen (John Argo, Jean Cullen) and I have been active on the Web since 1996. I have had a number of websites up for more than 20 years. In the past few years, I finally figured out how to apply SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to my websites. That changes the domain names from http: to https: and it is a major, important upgrade. I am shocked that the ISFDB domain name address (http://www.isfdb.org/) has not yet been upgraded. PLEASE! it is so easy to do, and so important. ISFDB is a tremendously important resource to all of us in this business, including authors, editors, and webmasters to name just a few. PLEASE somebody start working on this issue... it will only take a few hours to install & make active. Thank you! JTC anchor site: https://www.johntcullen.com

Yes, it is important, because of all the intellectual property theft from China and elsewhere, to make even the most casual site protected, much less a major site like this one. I'm not a mod, but I'm sure someone will heed your advice soon. Also, your author photo was blurry and a hat covered part of your face, so I replaced it (pending approval) with a "John Argo" Amazon photo of you, hatless, wearing a colorful shirt and holding a glass of champagne outdoors. Where was that taken? It looks lovely; I wish I was there now. P.S. Don't forget to sign your messages here by clicking the next-to-last symbol on the row above. --Username 08:39, 15 July 2022 (EDT)
Glad to hear that you find the ISFDB database to be an important resource! The site administrators are very much aware of the need to upgrade to HTTPS and have been working on it since late 2021. Unfortunately, it's not a straightforward process since our site uses complex software. It took months of work to upgrade everything and we are now testing the results on our public-facing test server, isfdb2.org. There is no ETA at this time. Ahasuerus 11:02, 15 July 2022 (EDT)

Macrae Smith

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?577858; I did some edits for Macrae-Smith Company books, and there was one Co. entry, the one linked above, which I added Archive link to and fixed the publisher's name, but there's no dash between the words so I entered it that way. Online photos of title pages of the other books by them online suggest that someone saw dots between the words in publisher's name and thought it was a dash. So if anyone can verify that all half-dozen Macrae-Smith books on ISFDB have no dash then they, plus book linked above, will all be under the same publisher. --Username 10:27, 15 July 2022 (EDT)

Marie Belloc Lowndes Titles

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?19896; Her collection is actually titled IN Terror across all editions so I fixed that, but 1 of her novels contains no Out in the original Brit ed. (title page on Google) so changing that would require unmerging and such, in case anyone wants to do that. The Timmy novel seems to have the same title in all editions, because there's a not-on-ISFDB Doran American ed. on Archive.org with the same title. --Username 00:55, 16 July 2022 (EDT)

Leisure Trade Paperback?!?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?50607; This book didn't have a cover until I added it and got it approved today, but the mod then made their own edit changing format to TP. Leisure was a low-rent paperback publisher, they didn't do trade paperbacks. I just did an advanced search for Leisure Books and TP format and out of nearly 700 books by the publisher a grand total of 2 books came up, this one that was just changed and a $1.50 Charles Berlitz Atlantis non-fiction book, which is also likely not a TP. --Username 15:00, 16 July 2022 (EDT)

"Adult" Book Notes

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pub_history.cgi?651649; So some time ago I added price to this book with a note, then added Wikipedia page, then added at least one of those external ID, and recently I added a note about the face on the cover not being some random art but rather the male star of the film, and then made another edit about there being 2 film photos on the back cover. From past experience ISFDB can't handle entering new info in an edit if the same field had info entered in a previous edit that hasn't been approved yet, as can be inferred from the fact that a mod approved the edit with the face info but then the photo info edit was left hanging for a while, with whoever looked at it probably wondering why this guy wanted to erase the info he previously wrote, which of course I had no intention of doing. I even tried to trick ISFDB this time because when I entered the first edit I did so on a separate line in the note box, but for the second edit I placed the info on the same line as my price info done some time ago. It didn't work. So now I've had to enter another edit adding back the erased info about the face. Is there a way to enter info without it erasing previous info? I sometimes find new info to enter while a previous edit is still in the queue, and don't like to wait for the first edit to be approved because it often takes so long to get to it in my usually very long list of edits that by the time it's approved I forget to enter the next set of info. --Username 19:28, 16 July 2022 (EDT)

Submissions operate on a "field-by-field" basis. Only changed field values are recorded when submissions are created. For example, suppose I create two Edit Publication submissions for the same publication record. We'll call them Submission A and Submission B. Submission A changes the price value from "$5.99" to "$7.99". Submission B changes the Catalog ID value from "D-272" to "D-273". Since only these two changed values will be stored in the submission records, the two submissions won't overlap and can be approved in any order.
On the other hand, if Submission A changes the price value from "$5.99" to "$7.99" and Submission B changes it from "$5.99" to "$8.99", the approval order becomes important. Whichever submission is approved last will trump the other submission.
The same logic applies to Note fields. Whichever submission is approved last is the one that takes effect. If you create a submission which adds a sentence to the Note field of some record and then create another submission affecting the same Note field, the last approved submission will take effect. It would be safer to cancel the first submission, which can be done on "My Pending Edits" page, and create a new one. Ahasuerus 08:13, 17 July 2022 (EDT)

Flies on the Wall

This Alex Hamilton collection, which seems not to have been published in America unlike his earlier collection Beam of Malice (although that edition isn't on ISFDB), is rare and I did a lot of edits months ago piecing together the contents from searching the Google Books copy, discovering a contents listing online was missing 1 of the stories, finding a single copy on eBay so I could enter the price, uploading the full cover, etc. Today I randomly saw it on Archive.org (https://archive.org/details/fliesonwall0000hami); turns out someone uploaded it last month. Damn it. Anyway, most of the stories were collected in his bumper collection from Ash-Tree in 2007, but for some reason it seems his 1966 story "End of the Road" wasn't included and the original story "Fall" wasn't, either. So there's a couple of reasons this book is still valuable. Also, it's a good thing the eBay copy was complete because this copy is price-clipped, with an adorable little cut on the bottom of the front flap. --Username 11:03, 17 July 2022 (EDT)

French Vincent O'Sullivan

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1818259; Anyone know why this story, which is "When I Was Dead" in English, isn't a variant of that story, and why the anthologist is listed as a co-author? --Username 20:47, 17 July 2022 (EDT)

See Here

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?88940; "See" note may not be needed now that I've added the full cover, but there's so much tag stuff I don't know what to delete. --Username 10:41, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Thirty Seconds Over New York

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19266963W/Thirty_Seconds_Over_New_York; Anyone know what edition this is? I don't see this cover on eBay or in Google Images. The Collins edition which has no cover on ISFDB is online and it looks nothing like this. --Username 14:38, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Orchids for Doc

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?196373; Supposedly unpublished, but there is a WorldCat page that has a cover unrelated to the title, https://www.worldcat.org/title/orchids-for-doc-the-literary-adventures-and-autobiography-of-robert-aw-doc-lowndes/oclc/27728655, in case any old SF experts can do anything with this info. --Username 19:51, 18 July 2022 (EDT)

Birthing Person

A British author named Rodney Hyde-Thompson (can't get more British than that) wrote a 1972 HC novel called The Alternative about A MAN WHO GETS PREGNANT, and it was quickly released in America as a cheap Warner PB with sweet cover art and the usual comparison to Rosemary's Baby, followed (preceded?) by a British Sphere PB retitled Black Marriage, with a photo cover showing a man sitting in a rocking chair, wearing makeup and a dress, holding a baby doll in his arms. The Warner PB was on Archive.org so I entered that, the Sphere has an Amazon page and a WorldCat record so I entered as much info as I could from those, but the HC really needs a print copy handy to enter info from; the Warner PB doesn't even mention it was previously published in England. Anyone have a copy? Also, if any mods read this, can you approve those 2 edits before my hundreds of others, because I saw on eBay that the ISBN is on the spine, which of course can't be seen on the Archive.org copy. I'd like to enter that info before I forget. EDIT: Approved, and it only took 3 days. Thanks for the quick response; I really appreciate it. The ISBN has now been added so I can finally delete my bookmark of the eBay photo with the spine. --Username 11:29, 19 July 2022 (EDT)

The Collected Stories of Philip *D*. Dick

Looking at the edit history, this one has had 4 different editors/mods eyes on it, including a seemingly-inactive PVer, so I'm a tad wary of unilaterally fixing the apparent typo in the title without getting any second opinions.

Also, the mod note on the original edit which stated This edition was on Amazon.com US for a few weeks, where I bought it, before disappearing from their site. There was no publisher listed, and no ISBN. It feels like this - with slight wording tweaks - should probably be in the pub note, unless anyone objects? (That this pub is no longer available makes it harder to verify if the typo is/was genuinely in the pub, of course.) ErsatzCulture 10:18, 20 July 2022 (EDT)

Dave is probably going to show up from somewhere soon-ish :) If you want to add the note, go ahead. See also this for a conversation on other details on the thing. I am pretty sure the D. is a DB typo based on the long discussion we had on my page about it. Annie 12:50, 20 July 2022 (EDT)
You weren't kidding about the length of that thread ;-) I'll make the tweaks I proposed if there hasn't been any other feedback/dissenting opinion here in the next few days. ErsatzCulture 16:38, 20 July 2022 (EDT)

Internet Archive

https://blog.archive.org/2022/07/08/internet-archive-seeks-summary-judgment-in-federal-lawsuit-filed-by-publishing-companies; I've warned about this a few times before on these boards, but now it seems they're really getting serious. The Archive has always had a questionable practice of allowing any and every book, including hundreds of thousands of non-public domain titles, to be on their site, similar to YouTube and other sites. So it would be a major blow to this site if all those books weren't available anymore to add info from, not to mention to people who just like to read the books. So this is something to keep an eye on. Or is this something they go through regularly and it won't amount to anything? --Username 13:00, 20 July 2022 (EDT)

Canonical Name Change KC Grifant from K. C. Grifant

Any objections to making KC Grifant the canonical name and K. C. Grifant the alternate? The four titles attributed to K. C. Grifant shouldo have been credited to KC Grifant. I'll take care of the corrections when I make the change. John Scifibones 16:37, 21 July 2022 (EDT)

Hearing none, change made. John Scifibones 10:57, 28 July 2022 (EDT)

Sorcerer's Apprentice

https://archive.org/details/sa-016; The Wold story is on ISFDB with just a 1983 date and no note about where it came from, so I added a note about that, but philsp.com only mentions that story and the Keith Taylor article. So if anyone thinks the full contents should be entered here someone uploaded it recently. Philsp.com also mentions a #17 with a Karl Edward Wagner story but as far as I can see #16 is the only issue on Archive.org. --Username 08:22, 22 July 2022 (EDT)

I added the publication with a second article and the book reviews here. I've also been fixing the FictionMags links and adding RPGGeek links. Tom 10:56, 24 July 2022 (EDT)
Thanks. I noticed a lot of Sorcerer's Apprentice entries in the edit list; you went above and beyond. One thing I've been noticing is that some of the genre magazines that were uploaded to Archive.org (an uploader named SketchTheCow was responsible for many of them years ago) are incomplete; a very recent upload of an issue of a rare zine, Amazing Experiences, is missing 2 pages, which almost caused me to think that 1 of the stories listed in the contents wasn't in the zine. I was ready to crow about finding that out when I realized that the plot of a certain story didn't match the plot on the previous page ("The Yellow Pagoda"; the plot really shows up on the second page of the story, so I'm guessing not much is missed by the first page being missing; it seems like a sappy wish-fulfillment story about a woman who can't have a baby until she enters a pagoda at a carnival and a mysterious man from the Orient grants her wish and somehow makes her pregnant, but the ending takes a dark turn into pure horror; the author wrote a horror novel around the same time, Mantis, so I guess it's not too surprising). Also, the uploaded-in-2017 first issue of Night Cry from 1984 (which just reprinted stories from early issues of Twilight Zone Magazine) is missing SIX pages. What bothers me is that when I was rabidly printing every horror magazine that was uploaded several years ago I just assumed they were complete. I have at least half-a-dozen gigantic stacks of thousands of articles, essays, short stories, etc. printed at my local library that I haven't had time to read yet, and among them are hundreds and hundreds of stories from these magazines. When I finally get around to starting to read them, I wonder how many will be incomplete. So I suggest that anyone who works on anything having to do with archived zines, check and make sure they have all their pages, and if they don't leave a note in their record so other people will know. EDIT: I just noticed that Issue 16 which started this whole discussion doesn't have the issue number entered in the notes, while all the other issues have the issue # in the title, which I think is wrong; RTrace likes to fix those when he sees them. --Username 11:29, 24 July 2022 (EDT)
I have run into the issue with incomplete scans in the past. At least the SA scan had page numbers, so that helps. I added the issue number to the notes. Unfortunately, issue 17 also came out some time in '83, so both issues will end up with the same title. I have some more edits to make to the early issues as well to fix their links. Tom 11:38, 26 July 2022 (EDT)

Award Bibliography page - sorting by award type?

The "Award Bibliography" page currently sorts awards and nominations by year. That's fine for authors with relatively few awards, but it's not that great for more popular authors. For example, if you want to know if any of Paul J. McAuley's works have been nominated for the Hugo award, you have to search his "Award Bibliography" page for the word "Hugo", skipping false positives like the 2005 Sidewise nomination for "The 2005 Hugo Award Ceremony Script".

I am thinking that it would be helpful to split the "Award Bibliography" page into two separate pages: one by year, which would be identical to the current one, and the other one by award type, which would have separate tables for each award type, sorted by type name. Would that be an improvement? Ahasuerus 15:13, 22 July 2022 (EDT)

I'd love to be able to order that page by any of the 5 pieces of data in now shows - you have a similar issue if you are trying to find all nominations for a certain book for example (and they won't always be clustered if you sort per year because of translations and retrospective awards). So yes, having a second page grouping "per award" will be useful but having one which groups per title will also be a good idea IMO (if you are planning to do reorders anyway... :) ) Annie 15:20, 22 July 2022 (EDT)
Perhaps making the table that lists them sortable by some or all of the column headers? Would that be easy to implement? I know they have sortable tables on Wikipedia, though I haven't looked into how they are done. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 15:39, 22 July 2022 (EDT)
Making tables sortable is doable, but it would require some changes. For example, "Year and Award" is currently one column. We would need to split it into "Year" and "Award Type" before we could sort by award type. Also, translations and other variant titles would affect sorting by "Title", which may be better handled by creating a separate table layout.
One more thing. We have a "Statistics" report for Titles Ranked by Awards and Nominations; you can limit the results by title type, decade and year. It would be nice to be able to sort author-specific titles by "award score". It would help answer questions like "What's Author X's most popular works?". Ahasuerus 15:54, 22 July 2022 (EDT)
"Work with the most awards" is not necessarily the same as "most popular work" though :) Annie 17:56, 22 July 2022 (EDT)
True, but in the absence of publishers' sales numbers awards and nominations are probably as close as we can get. We could also create a "Sorted by the number of reviews" page. (Unfortunately, our "votes" system is not as popular as Goodreads', which would make it only marginally useful.) Ahasuerus 10:02, 28 July 2022 (EDT)
How about number of pubs? For example, using that as a ranking metric (*) puts Snow Crash ahead of Neal Stephenson's other work, which matches where it appears in the Goodreads number-of-readers metric, whereas it's only his #5 work in the award table.
(* at least when just counting the English language pubs, which is all I could be bothered to implement in my own version.) ErsatzCulture 10:46, 28 July 2022 (EDT)
Sure, we can do that as well. There may be a certain bias when some of the author's works are in public domain and some aren't, but it can still be useful. Ahasuerus 13:56, 28 July 2022 (EDT)
Other from that - yes - making these available on the individual authors' awards pages sounds like a good idea.
For the title sorting - that is why I did not mention making the tables sortable (if we do, we will need to pull "Original title" in its own column and that view will get too crowded and wide I think). I like our usual way of +1,+2 and so on in the address bar that we have in some other pages to switch between views and I think it can work well here as well. But either way works. Annie 17:56, 22 July 2022 (EDT)

(unindent) Hearing no objection, the following FRs have been created:

  • FR 1521 "Allow sorting authors' award pages by different fields"
  • FR 1522 "Author bibliography sorted by the number of reviews"
  • FR 1523 "Author bibliography sorted by the number of reprints"

Ahasuerus 14:00, 1 August 2022 (EDT)

Szélesi Sándor = Sandor Szelesi

Szélesi Sándor and Sandor Szelesi both appear on the birthdays section of the homepage today. The latter only has a single title (from a short story in a German anthology), so it would seem the second author record should be made a variant of the first one, or perhaps have the story changed to use the first author, if it looks like the latter is a data entry issue?

However, I noticed that both of the author records have "Legal Name: Szélesi, Sándor", which made me wonder if Hungarian uses <family name> <given name ordering> like Japanese. Wikipedia indicates that's the case, so I'm guessing the author records should be varianted (like we have for Cixin Liu and Liu Cixin), but a second opinion would be preferable before I start on edits about things that I don't have any expertise in.... ErsatzCulture 17:56, 23 July 2022 (EDT)

You' re right. In Hungary, the family name comes first, then the given name.Thanks for the discovery. I will correct this and change Sandor Szelesi into the alternative name. Rudolf Rudam 11:59, 24 July 2022 (EDT)

Triptych

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1157274; Someone uploaded some Cemetery Dance issues recently, and since William F. Nolan's work in #4, https://archive.org/details/cemetery-dance-4-spring-1990, was never collected in any of his many story collections I believe it should be made an essay, since he just talks about a few story ideas he's had but there's no actual story. --Username 19:04, 23 July 2022 (EDT)

New WorldCat?

Anyone else see a banner at the top of WorldCat which says a new WorldCat is coming? I wonder what "new" means. --Username 19:37, 25 July 2022 (EDT)

They are redesigning. The details are not fully released yet but they hinted at it earlier in the year: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=962866871258711 . As far as I know, there won't be missing features but as with any redesign, we shall see. Annie 20:18, 25 July 2022 (EDT)
Oh my God, they went and did it, and it's HORRIBLE. I only found out when I clicked an OCLC link on OL and it took me to this page, https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/16107969?tab=details, which doesn't even have the OCLC on the page anymore. Why don't these people ever learn? They totally screwed up IMDb a few years ago with their awful redesign and now this, plus Amazon seems to be changing because many pages now lead to some weird thing where they just show the cover and there's some message about an error at the top of the page. This is ridiculous. Can't any of these sites ever do a redesign that actually improves things? It all seems so pointless now. EDIT: You now have to click the "Show more information" at the top of the page to see the info that used to be on the bottom of the page without clicking anything. Jerks. --Username 23:31, 22 August 2022 (EDT)

Love Child

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1838099; Title is very confused; I discovered that the Secker variant title is actually the original title with the dash, as are Viking and Richards, so I added the dash to those 2 plus the overall title record; however, an eBay copy of Virago shows every photo except the title page but since there's no dash in any of them it's safe to assume title page has none, either, and there's a 2021 British Library edition on Amazon but not on ISFDB which also has no dash; the Bello copy on Google Books, however, has no dash and no "The", either. So when my edits are approved breaking the Secker variant and making later editions variants may be needed. --Username 10:21, 26 July 2022 (EDT)

Ralph Smith

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?8649; I see that I added the cover to Captain Vincible some time ago and also a link to an article, but does it really belong here, being comics? Also, OL only lists 2 editions, in 1984 and 1985, not 1998. If it does belong here, the 1800's Smith needs something to separate him from the later Smith. --Username 09:14, 27 July 2022 (EDT)

Where's Samuel L. Jackson When You Need Him?

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/User_talk:Mhhutchins#Snake.28s.29_.26_.28and.29_Ladders; This dude didn't respond to my message (I don't think he does respond here anymore) but I just saw in the edit list that he did something, but I don't think he quite got it, unless he's planning on doing more. So if anyone remembers, just check that the title in TZ (and art with same title) is changed properly and variants are OK. --Username 19:32, 27 July 2022 (EDT)

Futurians

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?838968; 1 John Day edition credits Greco while the other doesn't. Which is correct? There's a PV in common between both editions. --Username 09:54, 28 July 2022 (EDT)

New award "Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize" ?

This one had presumably been announced in the past, but hadn't been on my radar until the announcement of the first set of nominees popped up in my Twitter feed just now. Off the top of my head, I know that at least 5 of 9 nominees are works that are in the database, and I suspect the others either already are, or probably should be. Looks like it's a panel judged award with just a single category - although the eligibility period looks a bit off, as there are both 2021 and 2022 works amongst those nominees. (The official site indicates it uses a May-April eligibility period.) The value of the winning prize, and a fairly high profile set of judges (for this year at least) indicate it's a fairly serious prize that should be around for a while. ErsatzCulture 11:09, 28 July 2022 (EDT)

EDIT: I've just checked the titles I wasn't sure about, and all of them are already in the database, except for one that definitely looks to be speculative. ErsatzCulture 11:18, 28 July 2022 (EDT)
I wouldn't say that an expectation of "being around for a while" is a requirement -- a "real" award should be eligible for inclusion even if it dies after a year or two. What we primarily try to exclude is promotional gimmicks run by publishers and "paid contests". This award is clearly nothing like that.
Unless there are objections, I plan to add it to the list in a couple of days. Ahasuerus 13:17, 28 July 2022 (EDT)
The new award type and a single award category have been created. Ahasuerus 12:31, 30 July 2022 (EDT)
Thanks. By chance, I just added the missing nominated title a few minutes ago, so I'll add the nominees later this evening. ErsatzCulture 12:43, 30 July 2022 (EDT)

2022-07-29 -- server problems again

We are once again experiencing server problems. At the rate the virtual machine is leaking disk space, we will have to shut down in less than an hour. Al has been notified. Ahasuerus 14:26, 29 July 2022 (EDT)

Edit: The loss of disk space is even worse than what I saw a few minutes ago. We probably have 10-15 minutes left. Ahasuerus 14:27, 29 July 2022 (EDT)
I am about to shut the server down, right before it runs out of space. Ahasuerus 15:09, 29 July 2022 (EDT)
We are back up. Ahasuerus 20:48, 29 July 2022 (EDT)
I have a suggestion. Typing isfdb.blogspot.com verbatim on Google only brings up these 5 sites, [7], which are the actual site, an ancient ISFDB message from 2008 heralding the new site, and a couple of mentions on academickids.com; the last 2 are fake spam sites. Typing "isfdb blog" verbatim brings up these, [8], which are only slightly more numerous. When there are server problems there should be an obvious link to the blog, but there's not, so maybe someone can fix that. --Username 12:15, 30 July 2022 (EDT)
There are two different downtime scenarios:
  • A complete server shutdown when browsers fail to establish a connection to the server. There isn't much we can do about that.
  • The server is up but the database is not accessible for some reason. You can tell because trying to access any ISFDB page results in a "The ISFDB database is currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again in a few minutes" message. We can modify this message to say "http://isfdb.blogspot.com/ may have more information."
Ahasuerus 12:40, 30 July 2022 (EDT)
FR 1520 has been created. Ahasuerus 15:40, 30 July 2022 (EDT)
FR 1520 has been implemented. Ahasuerus 13:40, 7 August 2022 (EDT)
Great! One suggested tweak; "if this due" to "if this is due". --Username 09:38, 8 August 2022 (EDT)
Good point. Fixed. Ahasuerus 14:05, 8 August 2022 (EDT)

Pentacle

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?38644; The preview copy on Google has an essay by Ken Abner, who edited Terminal Fright where most of the stories appeared, but there's no 1999 edition on ISFDB, just the 1995 and the much later e-books. Anyone know where it originated? --Username 12:06, 30 July 2022 (EDT)

Samuel R. Delany / The Einstein Intersection - Cut / Restored Chapter

Various editions of The Einstein Intersection have a cut or restored chapter. I will shortly edit and PV five pub records: one and two and three and four and five which will be a new pub record. I will add a general note about the cut / restored chapter to the title record and a specific note to each of these five pub records. Whilst researching this, I noticed that the Ace fourth printing states "First Ace printing March 1967". The pub record for the Ace first printing currently has a date of 1967-00-00 so I will add the month, add a pub note stating the source and add the month to all the associated records. There are far too many PVs to notify individually hence this posting on the Community Portal. I will wait a few days in case there are comments before submitting all these edits. Teallach 13:56, 30 July 2022 (EDT)

I have submitted the edits. There are eight in the queue. Teallach 11:42, 2 August 2022 (EDT)

Meyrink Cover

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?138313; The 1992 Dedalus ISBN links, on OL, to a 2004 Dedalus cover while on Amazon it shows the Ariadne cover. So is Ariadne Dedalus under a different name, and is it correct for the cover to be dated 1936, when it was painted, instead of the book's date? --Username 20:22, 30 July 2022 (EDT)

She's Dead, Jim

Well, Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek's Lt. Uhura, has died at the age of almost 90, and from the info on her Wikipedia page it looks like the last 5+ years of her life were pretty sad. Anyway, I added a better cover and an OL link to the Archive copy of her autobiography Beyond Uhura (the British Boxtree HC, which is the only non-PV edition), but her novel Saturna's Quest is a bit puzzling, being from some obscure publisher, Planet X, unlike the first book in the series which was mainstream. It turns out the publisher's name has been wrong here for years, being Publishing and not Publications, which caused it to be lumped in with a Planet X that published books many years later. I fixed the name and imported a nice cover to the Wiki because Amazon and other ISFDB-friendly sites either have no cover or weirdly show the title page instead. Info is scarce, so if anyone owns a copy they may want to verify page count, etc. Only Takei (85), Koenig (85) and Shatner (91) are left (although Shatner will probably refuse to die when Death comes for him). --Username 19:35, 31 July 2022 (EDT)

Height Intro

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?39382; I recently added a newly-uploaded Archive copy of the Arkham, and just now added page #'s to the Millington because contents were all out of order, but I noticed the introduction is missing from the Star; page count is lower so maybe it's not in there, but maybe it is, so if anyone owns that edition they can say for sure and, if it is, it can be imported. --Username 10:21, 1 August 2022 (EDT)

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race

We currently have Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race listed as a novella. The Note field reads:

Per a tweet from the author, this is a novella. Kobo reports a word count of 40k words. A conservative word count of 250 words per page, and 165 pages (blank pages are excluded) give 41,250 words, above the NOVEL threshold.

I have a copy of the ebook and the lowest possible word count -- once you delete the copyright page, the dedication, etc -- is 40,347. As per Help:Screen:NewPub, a novella must be "less than or equal to 40,000 words". Any objections to changing the title type to NOVEL? Ahasuerus 17:00, 1 August 2022 (EDT)

I did an estimated word count from my print copy using the tool (I think it was the one Mhutchins created?) and got 39,384. It's definitely right on the border, and there's a page of smaller text with two columns, so it may well bump over to 40k. There are a lot of blank pages scattered throughout the book. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 18:40, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
FWIW: "Editing this novella back and forth over the 40k word limit like I'm God and the Devil fighting over its soul." The dating of that tweet would suggest it refers to either Eldar Race or Ogres, the latter of which also has a 40k word count reported by Kobo. ErsatzCulture 19:31, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
The Hugo admins also consider it a novella. While they can make a mistake, I cannot find anyone online challenging the type - and the SF community is not exactly silent with such things... Annie 19:43, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
Hugo FAQ says "Also note that there are similar principles involved with the relocation of works in the four written-fiction categories, which also have a +/- 20% gray zone around their respective category boundary lengths." I dunno if any other awards have a similar fudge factor; if not, that might explain why getting under 40k is still the target for novellas? ErsatzCulture 20:06, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
I know they can fudge a bit - but even when they do, someone does complain :) Especially the fans (and occasionally authors) of the novella(s) that did not make the cut... And unless my google-fu is broken, I cannot find anything (and I don't remember anyone complaining). It is possible that this one slipped and went a bit higher. If Ahasuerus is sure in his count, I am fine converting it with notes - it is just way too close for estimates :( Annie 20:35, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
Are you sure it is not counting some extras (pages numbers, chapters titles, single words split into two lines and so on)? If you are sure of the count, then we just need to document and change the type I think but I will be very surprised if it did not got edited down to fit a category (because it was never going to get a novel nomination). Not that it cannot happen of course :) Annie 19:43, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
Well, it's an e-book, so there are no page numbers or split words.
I am using TextPad to count words in an ASCII version of the file. TextPad is pretty good at it since it's part of its core functionality. For example, the e-book uses "* * *" as chapter/scene separators, but TextPad doesn't count them as separate words.
There are no chapter titles per se, but POV changes are marked with the name of the POV character. It could arguably subtract a few dozen words from the "official" count, but it would still be well over the 40,000 word limit. Ahasuerus 21:33, 1 August 2022 (EDT)
Sounds like it did not get under the wire then... :) Depending on how they made the ebook, split words can be an issue (surprisingly enough that happens now and again even in new books from major publishers...) - thus the question :) Same for page numbers and the like - although these show up more often in OCR messes than in new books. As I said, if you are sure in the count, I do not object a conversion. Annie 22:36, 1 August 2022 (EDT)

(unindent) Thanks, folks. I have updated the title and publication records, including Notes. Ahasuerus 12:38, 3 August 2022 (EDT)

Russian Interference

Uh-oh; I mentioned this some time back, but FantLab seems to have gone through some changes recently because today I had to replace Thomas Monteleone's author photo from FantLab because the old one was broken, and now I was looking at Star Book of Horror 1 and that FantLab cover is also broken. I noticed the replacement photo I added was the same URL except there wasn't the word "data" at the beginning, if that helps. I'll be damned if I'm going to replace anything besides that photo, so I assume when mods get everything sorted out there will be a general fix for all broken links, right? Please? --Username 10:19, 2 August 2022 (EDT)

Checking their security certificate, I see that it expired earlier today. Let's wait a day or two and see if their administrators renew it. Ahasuerus 11:35, 2 August 2022 (EDT)
They have updated their security certificate, which should remain valid for the next 90 days. Everything seems to be working again -- see Star Book of Horror No. 1. Ahasuerus 12:28, 3 August 2022 (EDT)
Great! I cancelled my Monteleone edit and made another one because even though the author image is now working again, when I added it long ago I forgot to erase the trailing "?r=" thing at the end of the URL, and I also found a rare 1990 interview conducted by fellow horror author Robert McCammon on a TAPE RECORDER (kids, ask your parents), so another edit was necessary. However, in the many edits I've made since I wrote this I may have replaced 1 or 2 FantLab images that were broken while I was adding other info to the record the image was in, so I'm mentioning that to forestall any complaints of "Why did you replace a perfectly good image?!?" when a moderator gets around to approving them. --Username 12:43, 3 August 2022 (EDT)

Mira

Famous author James Patterson edited an anthology, Thriller, back in 2006 which included some well-known names; someone entered it here but didn't add any contents (doubtful most of them are genre, anyway) and the page count was off by nearly 200 pages, so I fixed/added stuff from the Archive copy; however, the publisher, Mira, got lumped in, I think, with a Mira that publishes women's fiction, of which there are nearly 600 on ISFDB. So the question is how to differ this book's publisher, and whether among those 600 there may be at least a few that are by this Mira. EDIT: I decided to do an advanced search using publisher and 7783 ISBN and it turns out that this Mira IS the same as the others, which is weird because they published books by women and this anthology's 30+ writers are mostly men. Oh well. --Username 13:45, 2 August 2022 (EDT)

Hot Blood

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?8749; I added the Book Club edition of Stranger By Night from Archive.org, which shows the PB cover on OL, and then noticed, as usual with these insane Pocket Books with their Canadian maple leaf editions and several printings and whatnot, that the cover for the original PB of Hot Blood was not the right cover, having no price (possibly the Gallery edition; they used the same Pocket covers but ridiculously jacked up the prices). There's an Archive copy of the Book Club edition which also shows a different cover on OL, also added by me, but after importing the original PB cover, because it doesn't seem to be on any friendly sites (FantLab shows the later printing's cover with the much higher price that's already on ISFDB, but then shows a photo of the back cover of the original edition!), I noticed that the subtitle on the original PB cover is Provocative, not Erotic. There's some confusion about that, with other editors making notes about how later editions say Erotic on the cover but still use Provocative on the title page, so I believe the original cover is the only one with the original title on both cover and title page. So just mentioning this in case anyone owns a lot of editions and can compare and make sure everything's as it should be re: proper titles, prices, covers and such. --Username 20:36, 2 August 2022 (EDT)

Kheryn Callender / Kacen Callender canonical name change

I think it is time to switch the canonical name here. Except for the few early editions of the first book, all books are published under Kacen Callender. Any objections? Annie 18:42, 3 August 2022 (EDT)

Sounds like a plan. Ahasuerus 23:01, 3 August 2022 (EDT)
And done while adding their new book. Annie 13:09, 4 August 2022 (EDT)

Smoking Shatner

In a follow-up to my Nichelle Nichols post above, I replaced the terrible William Shatner ISFDB photo, too-bright, old, and fat, with a crystal-clear B&W photo of a young and incredibly handsome Shatner smoking a cigarette, so you know it's from a long time ago. Looking next at George Takei, I think his photo is OK as it is, but I noticed that his 90's autobiography has a British price here for the Archway edition; the copy on Archive.org, https://archive.org/search.php?query=takei%20%22to-the-stars%22&and[]=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and[]=collection%3A%22internetarchivebooks%22, has only American prices. It seems the original editor was the one who entered that price, but they're very long-gone. There's also some odd confusion about the ISBN being re-used from some much older book. So anyone more familiar with this book may know more, like where that British price came from, and whether it should just be changed to the American price and the Archive copy linked here. --Username 20:29, 4 August 2022 (EDT)

May Dawney Designs

Checking... Three different May Dawney Designs - I guess we should merge these into just May Dawney Designs, right? MagicUnk 13:16, 5 August 2022 (EDT)

Done. Looking at the Amazon Look Inside for the pubs, the 2021 and 2022 were copyright year credits and not part of the name. -- JLaTondre (talk) 15:56, 5 August 2022 (EDT)

Mysterious Poe Collection

https://archive.org/details/illustratededgar0000poee; Found this with no dustjacket, contents don't correspond to the other book with that title on ISFDB (also published in 1976), by Jupiter but there's a reprinted by Bookthrift on bottom of title page, Bookthrift only appears once on ISFDB as the publisher of an F. Paul Wilson book in 1990 with no cover image and ISBN finding nothing, ISBN of this Poe title finds 2 different Amazon covers, both terrible sideways photos, and Goodreads cover is upright but badly framed and damaged. So does anyone own a copy/know more? --Username 12:53, 6 August 2022 (EDT)

Molt Brother

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?22570; As I've been working on Playboy books, some were entered as Playboy Press when they were really Playboy Paperbacks, and here's one with several active PV. Photo of title page here, https://www.ebay.com/itm/112360554002. Needs fixing? EDIT: Mind War, http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?290886, is on OL and even though there's a (non-active) PV the cover artist wasn't entered from the copyright page so I took care of that, but then the publisher is Playboy Press Paperbacks so I changed it to that, and then the LCCN does show up on the LOC site but as "invalid" and a completely different one is listed as "valid" so I entered that. However, looking further, it seems that a lot of PB from the publisher were entered as Playboy Press, the HC name, but somewhere along the way they switched the PB name from Playboy Press Paperbacks to just Playboy Paperbacks, but editors entering them on ISFDB couldn't decide because there are more than a dozen with the longer name and several dozen with the shorter; far too many of them have active PV, so I'm just fixing Mind War's publisher and leaving the other ones alone. Someone here with a ton of patience could go through every paperback and fix everything. --Username 13:31, 6 August 2022 (EDT)

Robert Foster Middle-Earth guides

This author has 4 different Middle-Earth guide titles published between 1971 and 2001; pubs of the 1971 and 1978 iterations have verifiers. The copyright page text copied into the notes indicates that these are revisions of the same book e.g. from a 1978 pub: "First Ballantine Books Edition: August 1974" (over) "Revised and enlarged edition: March 1978 (hardbound)", so I'm just double checking that the consensus that the later titles are definitely different enough that they shouldn't be varianted from the original 1971 one?

The reason I ask is that there's another version of this to be published next month. The blurb doesn't indicate any difference in content from earlier versions, other than the addition of illustrations, so I'm inclined to variant it to the 2001 version, but throwing open to any alternative opinions...? ErsatzCulture 12:41, 8 August 2022 (EDT)

Horne Anthology Art

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?33822; I added a link to the Book Club edition; PV is gone now. I also added a link to the PB (at least 1 active PV), but artist was entered as Daniel even though it says Dan in the PB and note even mentions that, so I changed it to Dan. I'm sure someone will say something about this. --Username 12:51, 8 August 2022 (EDT)

The Man Who Created Tarzan

https://archive.org/search.php?query=porges+tarzan&sin=; I came across these 2 books, 1 uploaded more than 10 years ago and 1 uploaded recently. The HC is a 2nd printing, and PV is not around anymore, while the PB has 1 active PV who I tried to interest in looking at Archive's copy to compare with his own and possibly add or fix anything, especially since it seems the uploader only included the first volume, not the second, but PV wasn't having any of it, apparently being a Luddite who only cares about physical copies, which I can sympathize with, being in my early fifties and remembering when people actually read books on paper. So I mention this here in case anyone who's interested in Burroughs wants to see if this printing of the HC differs in any way from the original entered on ISFDB (people who like entering multiple printings would probably want to enter it, anyway, just for posterity) or if the half-uploaded PB can yield anything useful. EDIT: I noticed that the publisher of the HC, Brigham Young University Press, only has 1 other ISFDB book, a kids' book from nearly 40 years earlier, while Brigham Young University has dozens of ISFDB books starting in the mid-1980's. Just thought that was weird; I can't believe the only 2 genre books they published in nearly 40 years were a little chapbook and a Tarzan bio. --Username 14:11, 8 August 2022 (EDT)

Emperor of the If

Just a heads-up that this rare novel by Guy Dent is on Luminist.org, but since they seem to have converted all of their books to PDF they screwed up because the PDF link goes instead to a French fairy tale book a little further down the list. The archived Google Drive and Dropbox links are, of course, very dead, but I managed to find a PDF on some Canadian digital archive and have made an edit with a link to it. I've been adding many PDF links and author photos from Luminist recently and this is the first mistake I've come across, so if anyone is friends with whoever runs that site they may want to let them know that Dent's PDF goes to the wrong book. --Username 21:12, 8 August 2022 (EDT)

Ten Tomorrows

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34741; There's at least 2 permanent PV and 1 transient, so I'll just mention this here. Someone wrote a note about initials on the cover and how they don't appear here, but they do, so I added the cover artist, FMA (along with a PDF link to the book). --Username 11:06, 9 August 2022 (EDT)

Margaret (P.) Killjoy

Does anyone object making Margaret P. Killjoy (4 credits, all from 2007 in Steampunk Magazine) to Margaret Killjoy (various credits from 2009 onwards, including the same magazine)? I've not found anything to definitively tie the 4 earlier credits to the latter person - their personal site seems to be down, which might have had some useful info - but the common publication venues, and very similar but distinctive names, makes me think it highly unlikely they are 2 different people. ErsatzCulture 12:16, 9 August 2022 (EDT)

Margaret P. Killjoy is an alternate name for Margaret Killjoy. She was an editor of 'Steampunk Magazine'. The masthead of early issues credited 'Margaret P. Killjoy' later issues 'Margaret Killjoy'. Various work is credited to both names as well as just Margaret within a given issue. Of the four titles, only Issue Three: The Sky is Falling has the correct attribution. Go ahead and make the alternate name & variant the one title (correct the case first, 'Is'). John Scifibones 10:50, 10 August 2022 (EDT)
Thanks - I'll make the edits as you propose in the next day or so, assuming no objections are raised. ErsatzCulture 13:33, 10 August 2022 (EDT)

Gaines

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=gaines&type=Name; I found an uncommon photo of the founder of Mad Magazine, but after adding it I saw that ISFDB has a Bill Gaines/William Gaines as a separate person, which should probably be linked to William M. Gaines. --Username 15:32, 9 August 2022 (EDT)

Arthur Hailey Cover Artist

Mr. Hailey, writer of many once-popular books, like Airport, that nobody reads anymore, has 1 novel on ISFDB, In High Places, from 1962 (although apparently it was published in 1961 elsewhere and serialized in Canada in Maclean's magazine and a bunch of other confusing stuff that I'm willfully ignoring); it's a possible nuclear war type of book, so popular in the 1960's, and was reprinted roughly a zillion times, many editions being on Archive.org (but none on ISFDB), but the original American edition from Doubleday, for some reason, is very difficult to track down exact info on. Most eBay and other online sites either have no jacket or are a Book Club edition, but I finally managed to track down an auction of the original edition with the jacket flaps visible, https://picclick.com/In-High-Places-by-Arthur-Hailey-1962-1st-Edition-223453505903.html, although the seller started off with a bunch of photos with no jacket and stuck the jacket photo at the end, and the text on the flaps is either defective or was photographed badly, because some of it is tough to make out. I'm 99% sure the price is 4.95, so I included it in my edit, although I can't find a definitive place online where this price is mentioned, which is odd for such a mainstream book, but the real problem is the credit on the back flap. I've seen one other photo of the back flap online somewhere that was photographed bright and sharp, but the photographer cut off the photo after the words JACKET PAINTING, while the artist is visible here but the letters in the name are sketchy. I've tried finding it by searching for Homer in advanced search, but none of the 4 with that name match up, and it's possible it might not even be Homer. So does anyone know who the artist is? It's a very nice cover, and it would be good to credit them. --Username 21:41, 9 August 2022 (EDT)

Fortunes of Brak

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?28665; I added a Luminist PDF of the American Dell edition, but there's an un-entered (Book Club?) hardcover on Archive.org, uploaded last year, and I noticed it said DOUGLAS Beekman on the copyright page; there's no dustjacket. It turns out that it says so on the paperback's copyright page, too, so is it correct to go with the back cover's DOUG, as someone did, or should it be the longer name (which has a couple dozen entries on ISFDB)? --Username 13:26, 10 August 2022 (EDT)

Holt(-)White

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5387088; This author has the dash in his name for some of his books but clearly not for this one, as seen on the title page in the PDF. However, my edit was rejected, so was that right, or should it be accepted and author's name made a variant of the hyphenated name? --Username 20:42, 10 August 2022 (EDT)

Mod who rejected has un-rejected. All is well. --Username 19:56, 11 August 2022 (EDT)

Coronet Kersh

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?488936; While adding info about prices on back cover I noticed the title on the title page is the same as the American edition, so I fixed it and the cover art title, too. I don't know who provided the alternate title, but once my edit's approved some merging or unmerging or whatever needs to happen. Also mildly amusing is they partially rewrote the cheesy blurb on the back cover because, I guess, Brits wouldn't know what premium redemption stamps are. --Username 22:47, 10 August 2022 (EDT)

City of Glass

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5388100; Rare book, Luminist PDF shows there are 2 numbered ad pages after the novel, PV hasn't responded to anything since last October, so should another edit be made to change the page count? --Username 19:55, 11 August 2022 (EDT)

Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years by Peter Nicholls is out

Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years, a compendium of 60 articles and reviews by the late Peter Nicholls (the mastermind behind the first version of Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1979), is now out in paperback and as an e-book. It's not available from Amazon, but you can order both versions directly from the publisher, which also makes the table of contents available online. There are no page numbers, but Dave Langford has volunteered to provide a scan of the ToC of the paperback edition if anyone wants to enter the book. Anyone feel up to the task? Ahasuerus 15:20, 12 August 2022 (EDT)

Sure, I would do it. -- JLaTondre (talk) 21:20, 13 August 2022 (EDT)
Thanks! Dave has added a link to a scan of the first few pages to the ToC Web page, which should hopefully help. Ahasuerus 22:11, 13 August 2022 (EDT)
I have entered both the tp and ebook versions along with the contents. We did not have existing records for quite a few of the contents. The website provides a listing of original appearances so my next step will be to sort that out. Some may be variant titles, but others (like Hop Aboard Kids, We’re Going to 1984: Seven Children’s Books which first appeared in Foundation, #10) sound like they may have been review columns where we only list the reviews in the original publication. I will need to reach out to the verifiers of the original works so it will take a bit to work through that. -- JLaTondre (talk) 10:31, 14 August 2022 (EDT)
One step at a time :) Thanks! Ahasuerus 12:08, 14 August 2022 (EDT)

Make Variant - submission review changes

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have been working on a rewrite of the ISFDB software responsible for displaying submission review pages. As part of that rewrite "Make This Tile a Variant" has been changed. The following changes have been made:

  • All fields associated with the title record are now displayed in the table; in the past only the fields whose values were explicitly specified in the submission were displayed. This is supposed to help moderators see the entirety of the record and identify potential problems.
  • The order of rows within the table has been changed to match the order of rows in the edit forms which created the submission, e.g. "Authors" is now displayed after "Title" and "Transliterated Titles" as opposed to at the bottom of the table.
  • The left column and the right column of the displayed table use the same color since they represent separate title records and not changed values in the same record.
  • For COVERART titles, two separate rows are now displayed. The first one shows the title types and the second one shows the related cover scans (if there are any.)
  • All fields now display hyphens ("-") in empty table cells.
  • All fields have been updated to support multiple yellow warnings. In the past some fields supported only one yellow warning per field even if the software identified multiple problems with the submitted data.
  • If a field generates multiple yellow warnings, they now appear on separate lines, making them easier to parse.
  • A yellow warning is now displayed when creating a new parent title record with a disambiguated series name, e.g. "Future History".
  • A yellow warning is now displayed when any non-Notes/Synopsis fields of the proposed parent title record contain recognized HTML tags. (Notes/Synopsis fields will continue to display yellow warnings if an UNrecognized HTML tag is used.)
  • A yellow warning is now displayed if the languages of the two titles are different. This is experimental and may be removed if it proves to be distracting.
  • Yellow warnings are now displayed if there is a mismatch between the two titles' non-genre, juvenile, novelization and graphic flags.
  • Yellow warnings about new, pseudonymous and disambiguated author names now specify which author(s) they apply to. This should help when the proposed parent title has multiple authors.
  • For omnibus titles, a yellow warning is now displayed if there is a mismatch between the Content values of the two title records.

Please note that these changes are limited to the way Make Variant submissions are displayed. No changes have been made to the way field values are entered in your Web browser or to the way they are filed into the database.

If you come across any bugs or anything unexpected, please post your findings here. If everything looks OK after a few days, I will start making similar changes to other submission review pages. Ahasuerus 17:00, 13 August 2022 (EDT)

Spot-checking a few "Make Variant" submissions currently in the queue, I see a couple of relatively minor issues:
  • "Disambiguated author" warnings are displayed twice under some circumstances
  • Series names are not linked in the left column
I will start working on fixing them shortly. Ahasuerus 17:09, 13 August 2022 (EDT)
Fixed. Ahasuerus 18:22, 13 August 2022 (EDT)
Consider showing the warning only if the languages are different and the child title lacks the translator template. Would function as a reminder for the editors. John Scifibones 13:03, 14 August 2022 (EDT)
An interesting idea. Thanks. Ahasuerus 14:51, 14 August 2022 (EDT)
I noticed the yellow warning is also shown when varianting art titles (see this edit). This is confusing, because art titles don't need the translator template. --Willem 15:13, 14 August 2022 (EDT)
Perhaps we should get rid of the "Different languages" warning and replace it with a "Translator template" check for non-COVERART/INTERIORART titles. Ahasuerus 16:48, 14 August 2022 (EDT)

JFIF

Luminist.org includes some author photos with a .jfif extension, which is accepted here as I added Evelyn E. Smith's photo recently and there was no problem, and a search revealed it's the only .jfif image on all of ISFDB. Anyone familiar with it? --Username 09:47, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

I was only aware of its existence, and knew nothing about the technical details, but Mozilla's image format docs indicate that it's basically JPEG, and that there's shouldn't be any issues with any browsers rendering those images.

Tevis Dillon Cover

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?184021; I added FantLab ID because it shows the back cover, and noticed that 1 of the 4 PV here wrote a note about cover art being signed "illon"; Leo and Diane Dillon did a cover for Fawcett the previous year, so I think it's probably them, as several websites agree with. --Username 11:38, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

Double quotes in untitles award authors and plus signs in all author names disallowed

The following bugs were fixed in the patch installed a few minutes ago:

  • Author names associated with untitled awards could include double quotes even though double quotes are automatically converted to single quotes for all other author names. This was preventing the software from matching author records with untitled award records, e.g. George "Lan" Laskowski vs. George 'Lan' Laskowski. 25 award records will need to be fixed manually, which I plan to do later today.
  • The way the software is currently designed, plus signs can't be used within author names. A minority of data entry fields automatically stripped them during the data entry process while most didn't. The software has been upgraded to display a pop-up message telling you that plus signs are not allowed in author names. (Eventually I plan to upgrade the software design to allow plus signs, but it's a long term project.) 2 author names will need to be fixed manually, which I plan to do later today.

If you encounter any issues, please post your findings here. Ahasuerus 13:03, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

All affected records have been fixed. Ahasuerus 13:48, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

Helicon Award

I just ran across the Helicon Award, offered in a number of different categories since 2019. Here's the basic info:

  • Short Name: Helicon Award
  • Full Name: Helicon Award
  • Awarded For: "Recognizes the best in science fiction, fantasy and horror for each calendar year."
  • Awarded By: The Helicon Society
  • Poll: No
  • Covers more than just SF: No
  • Webpages: https://heliconawards.com/
  • Note: (from the website) Named after the mountain that the mythological Nine Muses called home, the Helicon Awards recognizes the best in science fiction, fantasy and horror for each calendar year. The 2019 Helicon Awards served as the awards’ inaugural year and covered works originally released in 2018. A selection committee meets several times prior to January 14th to select nominees and final winners for each category. Nominated works must have been published for the first time between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 of the previous year. Membership in the Society is not a requirement to be considered for an award.

Categories (2019):

  • Best Science Fiction Novel
  • Best Fantasy Novel
  • Best Military SFF Novel
  • Best Alternate History Novel
  • Best Media Tie-In Novel
  • Best Horror Novel
  • Best Anthology (SF/F/H)
  • Melvil Dewey Innovation Award
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder New Author Award
  • Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award

Categories (2020):

  • Best Sci-Fi
  • Best Fantasy
  • Best Military SF/F
  • Best Alt History
  • Best Media Tie-In
  • Best Horror
  • Best YA
  • Best Anthology (Book or story)
  • Best SF/F Movie
  • Best SF/F TV Series
  • Best SF/F Comic Book or Graphic Novel
  • Best SF/F Game
  • Melvil Dewey Innovation Award
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder Best New Author Award
  • John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award
  • Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award

Categories (2021):

  • Best Sci-Fi
  • Best Fantasy
  • Best Military SF/F
  • Best Alt History
  • Best Media Tie-In
  • Best Horror
  • Best YA
  • Best Anthology (Book or story)
  • Best SF/F Movie
  • Best SF/F TV Series
  • Best SF/F Comic Book or Graphic Novel
  • Best SF/F Game
  • Melvil Dewey Innovation Award
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder Best New Author Award
  • John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award
  • Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award

Categories (2022):

  • Best Sci-Fi
  • Best Fantasy
  • Best Military SF/F
  • Best Horror
  • Best Alt-History
  • Best YA
  • Best Anthology
  • Best SF/F Movie
  • Best SF/F TV Series
  • Melvil Dewey Innovation Award
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder Best New Author Award
  • John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award
  • Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award

I'll be happy to populate them if the award is created. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:03, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

The name rang a vague bell, so I did a bit of Googling - IMHO it's a Sad/Rabid Puppies-esque culture war thing for the founder to give prizes to his friends. From File 770, which is not exactly a completely unbiased source - see below the quotes - but I'm open to other coverage/documentation:
(15) HELICONIA WINTER. Richard Paolinelli handed out the 2021 Helicon Awards [Internet archive link] yesterday, some to bestselling sff writers, two to L. Jagi Lamplighter and Declan Finn, but if you want to know what’s really on Richard’s mind look at this entry on the list:
John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award – J.K. Rowling
Paolinelli also presented awards named for Melvil Dewey and Laura Ingalls Wilder, which he created after their names were removed from two American Library Association awards in recent years.
....
(13) HELICON AWARDS. Richard Paolinelli celebrated the Fourth of July by announcing the ten inaugural winners of the Helicon Awards on his YouTube channel. Sad Puppy Declan Finn won the Best Horror Novel category, which is probably more informative about where these awards are coming from than that Brandon Sanderson and Timothy Zahn also won.
....
Throughout the presentation Paolinelli keeps using the pronouns “we” and “our” without shedding very much light on who besides himself is behind these awards. The slides for the winners bear the logo of his Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators Guild, opened last year with the ambition of rivalling SFWA. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators Guild closed group on Facebook is listed as having 275 members – you can’t see the content without joining, but FB displays a stat that it’s had 6 posts in the last 30 days. The SFFCGuild Twitter account hasn’t been active since February 2018.
Paolinelli’s blog claims sponsorship of the awards, but in the video he says not only won’t winners be receiving a trophy, he hasn’t even designed a certificate for them, though he might do that in a few weeks.
In addition to the 10 Helicon Awards, Paolinelli named “three individual honorees for the Mevil Dewey Innovation Award, Laura Ingalls Wilder Best New Author Award and the Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award.”
So far as the first two awards are concerned, it’s likely that what did most to persuade Paolinelli to give them those names was the decision by two organizations this past year to drop the names from existing awards – in Wilder’s case (see Pixel Scroll 6/25/18 item #5), the US Association for Library Service to Children said it was “over racist views and language,” while the American Library Association dropped Dewey (see Pixel Scroll 6/27/19 Item #13) citing “a history of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual harassment.”
I note that one of the 2022 winners is a book entitled "China Mike", which I'm sure by complete coincidence is a derogatory nickname that the Puppy crowd use to refer to Mike Glyer of File 770. ErsatzCulture 18:35, 15 August 2022 (EDT)
It looks like the core eligibility issue here is whether the Helicon Society has a non-trivial number of members beyond Richard Paolinelli. If it's effectively a one man show or a small press trying to promote its authors, then we wouldn't want to include the award. If it's more than that, then it's a different story.
Here is what I am seeing so far. The main award page says the following about the Helicon Society:
  • The Helicon Society was founded in 2018 and is a collective of SF/F authors and other creators who subscribe to the Superversive approach to creating SF/F media and look to promote good quality sci-fi/fantasy entertainment to their customers.
  • It is not an official organization, it collects no fees and membership is by invitation only.
  • Membership in the Society is considered private, unless the member chooses to publicly announce they are a member of the Society. Any inquiries, or requests for a membership list, will be ignored.
This makes it hard to tell whether it's a one man show. https://scifiscribe.com/ , Paolinelli's Web site, used to have a Web page about the Helicon Society, https://scifiscribe.com/the-helicon-society/ . Unfortunately, it and other Helicon Society-related Web pages at that Web site are no longer available. The Wayback Machine says This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Luckily, Google still has a cached version of the main Helicon Society page. The "Reviews" section has two bullets: "Reviewers Wanted" and "Richard’s Reviews", which suggests that the only reviewer is Paolinelli. The "ABOUT" section has one link to a sub-page about "TUSCANY BAY BOOKS" -- see their Web site and the ISFDB Publisher page, including the Author breakdown page for this publisher.
The other thing that I noticed after reviewing the list of 2019-2022 winners was that there was a shift in the winning authors in 2022. In 2019-2021 the winners included Robert J. Sawyer, Ann Leckie, Jack McDevitt, S. M. Stirling and other established authors. In 2022 the winner in the "Best Sci-Fi" category was "Eerie" by Gibson Michaels, which has no ratings or reviews on Goodread after 11 months. The winner in the "Best Fantasy" category was "Dusklight" by N. R. LaPoint, which has 4 ratings and 2 reviews on Goodreads after 14 months.
At the moment I have more questions than answers. Ahasuerus 21:31, 15 August 2022 (EDT)
Yeah, I don't know that I'd trust File 770 to be impartial about anything related to Sad Puppies as there is a long history of animosity on both sides. Regarding Goodreads, it is (at least in my experience) really hit or miss when it comes to number of reviews something gets there. I've noticed that a lot of more conservative authors tend to have fewer people reviewing their works on the site, even if they have sold well (even reaching #1 in multiple categories on Amazon in multiple cases). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 12:26, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
I wasn't aware of possible major discrepancies between Goodreads and Amazon rating. Curious.
Checking Amazon.com's record for Eerie, I see that the book has 2 ratings and no reviews. Its rankings within Amazon's browse node system is as follows:
  • #1,980,551 in Kindle Store
  • #9,228 in Historical Fantasy (Kindle Store)
  • #15,617 in Fairy Tale Fantasy (Kindle Store)
  • #16,482 in Historical Fantasy (Books)
Dusklight fares somewhat better: 4 Amazon ratings and the following rankings:
  • #320,712 in Kindle Store
  • #271 in Christian Fantasy (Kindle Store)
  • #299 in Christian Fantasy (Books)
  • #476 in Religious Science Fiction & Fantasy (Kindle Store)
At the same time, Gibson Michaels, the author of Eerie, was nominated for the Dragon award in 2016, which suggests that there may be more going on than someone "giving out awards to their friends". Ahasuerus 12:50, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Top post on the Gibson Michaels Facebook page: It's been a slow process, but Gibson Michaels' last work is now available for pre-sale on Amazon.com. Publish date is set for Sept 7, the anniversary of his passing. I'm very grateful for the help of Richard Paolinelli and Dawn Greenfield Ireland for their contributions to help me get Mike's last work out there. What exactly that refers to is unclear, but it would seem there is/was some relationship betwen Paolinelli and and Michaels.
Also, based on the Rose Oliver blog post, Midlands Scribes Publishing - the publisher of the 2021 Mil SF category winner - is a Paolinelli company; he also contributed one story and the cover.
2020 anthology winner Places Beyond the Wild is from a different publisher, but amongst the contributors listed on the Amazon UK product page are Paolinelli, Declan Finn (seemingly the most prolific author at Tuscany Bay Books) and at least one other author who's had multiple titles published from Tuscany Bay. ErsatzCulture 17:45, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Update: The 2022 Best Anthology winner (not currently in the database, ASIN is B0B72GZMMV) was also published by Tuscany Bay in its first edition, per the Amazon preview. ErsatzCulture 18:24, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Regardless of any of that, I don't know that we should be making decisions on which awards to include based on what boils down to politics. We've had other awards that are handed out by unknown judges who use unknown methods in choosing the winners. I think the fact that this award has been given out to a fairly broad range of well known and lesser know authors would indicate that, whoever the judges are, they are doing more than simply giving out awards to their friends. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 12:26, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Politics is certainly not a criterion when deciding which award-sponsoring organizations are eligible for our purposes -- we list everything from the Prometheus Award given by the Libertarian Futurist Society to the Soviet-era Aelita Award. The question that I am struggling with is whether this particular award sponsor is more than one or two people. Ahasuerus 12:50, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

[Resetting indent to respond to some of Nihonjoe's and Ahasuerus comments]

Nihonjoe> I've noticed that a lot of more conservative authors tend to have fewer people reviewing their works on the site, even if they have sold well

I agree with this - e.g. I've been regularly scraping the Publisher's Weekly monthly genre top 10s and for the past few years, and David Weber is one of the few "new release" authors who can get (some of) his pubs into that chart, yet he has somewhat underwhelming numbers-of-ratings on Goodreads (whilst still outperforming other authors who write in the same niches). So, whilst Goodreads stats are an interesting thing to look at, they should be taken with a large pinch of salt, especially when there's any amount of fake/bot activity on there for several years.

Nihonjoe> ...even reaching #1 in multiple categories on Amazon in multiple cases
Ahasuerus> [other stuff about Amazon rankings]

The problem I have with Amazon rankings as any sort of meaningful indicator of popularity, is that I don't think Amazon have ever described how exactly those rankings are calculated, specifically in terms of the time periods they cover. e.g. if the rankings are only based on a very short period, then being one of the top ranked books in some subgenre probably doesn't mean very much. (If anyone does know more about how Amazon rankings are calculated, I would genuinely be very appreciative of that info.)

Ahasuerus> Gibson Michaels, the author of Eerie, was nominated for the Dragon award in 2016

That was the first year of the Dragons, and IIRC they weren't publicized very widely. I would contend there are a number of "interesting" results in that first year which others have documented more thoroughly.

Nihonjoe> I don't know that we should be making decisions on which awards to include based on what boils down to politics
Ahasuerus> Politics is certainly not a criterion when deciding which award-sponsoring organizations are eligible for our purposes

I agree. (Note that I personally added 2020's Prometheus Best Novel finalists, and I'm currently trundling through this year's Dragon finalists, both of which could reasonably be argued are on the right hand side of the awards spectrum.) However, when the Helicon Awards has the "John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award", with past winners being Larry Correia, JK Rowling and Orson Scott Card, does anything think those are legitimate awards, as opposed to using culture war icons for trolling purposes? (As an aside, I see zero indication that they have obtained permission from the relevant estates to name the "John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award" or the "Frank Herbert Lifetime Achievement Award" the way they have.)

Nihonjoe> I think the fact that this award has been given out to a fairly broad range of well known and lesser know authors would indicate that, whoever the judges are, they are doing more than simply giving out awards to their friends.

I disagree. Putting well-known and respected figures (e.g. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman) alongside their clique was a key part of the Puppy Hugo slating tactics, and was repeated for the second year of the Dragons.

Some general comments and observations:

  • I don't see that SFADB has covered this award
  • The Helicon Society Twitter account has all of 37 followers and none of its Tweets have had more than low single digit interactions.
  • The top few Google search results for "helicon awards" (which may well be different for other people are): the File 770 tag I posted earlier; the heliconawards.com site; a blog post by a contributor to one of a winning anthology (thanking the publisher, Richard Paolinelli - what an amazing coincidence...), a couple of other blog posts by other winners/finalists, and unrelated results

None of these convince me that this is a widely recognized award.

NB: I am quite possibly being overly negative about this particular award; there are several high profile awards that strike me as having an overly close link between their current or former organizers and the works that get nominated and/or win, so picking on this particular one is perhaps unfair. However, their own statements about "It is not an official organization, it collects no fees and membership is by invitation only." and "Any inquiries, or requests for an official membership list, will be ignored." make me unwilling to consider it at all seriously. ErsatzCulture 14:51, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Does an award need to be "widely recognized" to be included here? ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 16:40, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
I don't think it does. Regional and specialized awards often have a limited number of people involved and that's fine.
The question -- in my mind -- is where do we draw the line? A single person giving awards to his or her friends is clearly not a real award. A small press giving "best of the year" awards only to its authors is presumably not a "real" award either. However, we include the Analog Awards, which is limited to works published in Analog. We also include АБС-премия / ABS-premiya, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, was controlled by a single prominent SF author:
  • [Boris Strugatsky] was responsible for appointing jury members and the nominating commission as well as selecting nominees based on the commission's recommendations
I am trying to think of a single rule which would help us determine award eligibility, but there are too many possible permutations :-\ Ahasuerus 08:59, 17 August 2022 (EDT)
I wasn't aware of that criterion. The UtahSF Awards certainly weren't widely known, and they were only given out for 3-4 years, but we've included them. They were definitely a regional award. And SFADB is hit or miss as far as covering awards, in my experience.
Regarding "putting well-known and respected figures (e.g. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman) alongside their clique", it seems you may be overly biased against the Sad Puppies as that's misconstruing what I've read on the topic. Everything I read showed that they based their selection criteria off which books and stories they enjoyed the most, regardless of who wrote them. I definitely don't agree with how the Sad Puppies approached some things in their various campaigns, but that part seemed consistent throughout all of them. Note that this is the Sad Puppies, not the Rabid Puppies (whose only goal was to destroy the Hugos). It's possible you were conflating the two different groups.
As for refusing to divulge their membership list for an organization that isn't really organized, who cares? ··日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 16:40, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
It's not a requirement, it's just something that might help us determine whether this society/award are more than a single person. Then again, it's also possible that this society's (active) membership has fluctuated over the years. When a new organization is formed, it's often due to a surge of interest in some topic and then that interest dissipates over time, leaving only a few people involved. That's what happened to Mack Reynolds's Socialist Labor Party of America, which had the support of tens of thousands of voters during the 20th century, but has faded away over the last few decades.
In addition, I am thinking that the fact that this award was apparently created as a side effect of fandom politics may be a minor argument in favor of its inclusion. An award created out of desire to promote some kind of common cause -- in this case adherence to "superversive principles" -- is arguably of more interest than an award given to its creators' friends. Ahasuerus 09:21, 17 August 2022 (EDT)
I think it likely was created as part of the "superversive" movement (though that was around prior to the Sad Puppies). And I agree that would be a good point in favor of including it. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 11:11, 17 August 2022 (EDT)
As I mentioned before, there are any number of organizations that give out awards that don't provide specifics as to how they settle on the finalists or the winners. Some of them don't provide the names of the judges, either, but they are still included here. Listing it here doesn't lend it any more legitimacy than they currently have (however much that may be). It's simply providing the information for people to find, documenting speculative fiction information. The awards don't require a fee to enter, and it's not some marketing company (as far as I can tell) trying to drum up more business. That's the main reason I suggested they be included here. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 16:40, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
I feel like I am wasting my breathe in continuing to argue this, given that some of my prior points have gone unresponded to, but let me try one (final?) tack: there are rules of acquisition for pubs, if there were similar ones for awards, would this qualify. In particular, a story is not eligible for inclusion if it has just been thrown up on an author's blog, or some general site like Wattpad - so it seems strange to me that we would consider for inclusion an "award" that doesn't seem to have anything (digitally or physical) tangible beyond a domain name and Wordpress.com site, and a low traffic/follower Twitter account. (Maybe there's more on Facebook, but I didn't see anything much in a search - but this may say more about FB search and my minimal footprint on that platform.) ErsatzCulture 12:00, 18 August 2022 (EDT)
I think both you and Nihonjoe have raised good points; you have certainly provided a significant amount of evidence suggesting that this award is closely linked to a single person.
I believe the underlying problem is that ISFDB:Policy doesn't say anything about award eligibility -- there is a single reference to "major awards", but the term is not defined -- so we have to decide on a case by case basis. After reviewing the arguments for and against I am thinking that we should put the issue of this award's eligibility on hold and come up with a general award inclusion policy on the Rules and Standards page first. Ahasuerus 13:57, 18 August 2022 (EDT)
I'm fine with that. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:52, 18 August 2022 (EDT)
Other than the fact that RP has called these "awards", is there any meaningful difference between them and a blog posting their favourite books of the year (example)? I guess there's the fact that they are put into (sub)genre categories, but that seems pretty tenuous personally. As an aside, I find it odd that only winning works have been announced, but no longlist/shortlist/nominees/finalists - are there any other awards for works that do that? (i.e. not stuff like SFWA Grandmaster awards to individuals.)
Also, I have my doubts about the motivation for these awards. Prior to their advent, RP was called out for misrepresenting the award status of his books in advertising (claiming they were award winning when they weren't; claiming to be a "Nebula nominee (non-finalist)" which is pretty meaningless; listing pay-to-play awards], so what better way to avoid that sort of embarrassment than creating your own set of awards that you control?
(As a further aside, RP has a history of being pissy and abusive online to people who aren't complimentary to him, so I do wonder if/when I might fall into his sights for having the temerity to question one of his pet projects.)
And just to summarize and reformat details I've (mostly) already posted above: in the 4 years these awards have been running, there have been 29 winners of the prose categories. Of those, by my reckoning, 7 of these have editions published (currently or formerly) by and/or have contributions from RP. A further 2 are from other publishers, but by authors who have other books published by RP; 1 more seems to have had RP involved in getting it published. i.e. just over a third of prose category winners have an explicit connection with the only person publicly identified with this award. ErsatzCulture 12:00, 18 August 2022 (EDT)
To respond to your comments in order:
  1. That's an interesting thought regarding "rules of acquisition" for awards. It might be difficult to define them, however.
  2. Regarding lack of much social media presence, I don't think that should play into it at all. Not everyone is good at social media, and it can require a lot of time. I think this is pretty much irrelevant from ISFDB's point of view.
  3. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in anything coming from Camestros Felapton when it comes to discussions of anything or anyone remotely connected to Sad Puppies. They (whoever they are, since that's not their real name) are extremely biased in that regard. Maybe those reasons were why the awards were created, but since we can't read minds, we can't know for sure.
  4. Regarding whether you might be noticed by RP, again, Camestros Felapton is an extremely biased source for that. Unless you are equally as visible as that pseudonym, I wouldn't worry about it.
  5. If 1/3 of the winners are as you describe, that means a super majority of them are not.
We can always put a disclaimer on the description of the awards (though it may be good to work out rules as mentioned). ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 14:55, 18 August 2022 (EDT)

To the Sound of Freedom

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?269192; Does anyone know if this was published? There's a few mentions online but no cover images anywhere, no Archive copy, nothing. --Username 18:06, 15 August 2022 (EDT)

Google Drive

I did a search in Advanced Search for publication webpages containing drive.google and several hundred came up; I replaced the 2 books' links, Falcons of Narabedla and The Elemental, with Luminist PDF, but all the rest are magazines, with a couple of hundred Analog/Astounding, single issues of other magazines, some webzines, etc. So there might be a need for Archive links for the print zines and online links for the webzines, etc. because Google Drive links are unstable at best. --Username 08:57, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

A Lion Books Checklist

I recently created a new record for a reprint 1956 Lion Library edition of the original 1952 Lion Books edition of The Naked Storm by Eisner/Kornbluth, using the Luminist.org copy (which is not the usual PDF that almost all of their books are now but a weird Adobe document thing), and thought it was something special I'd found until it was just approved today and I saw online that fadedpage.com has it fully readable in a half-dozen different formats (odd that nobody ever entered it here). Damn it. Anyway, two questions: can anyone verify whether the 1952 edition's title page has the ellipsis or not, and is this book, https://books.google.com/books?id=WLt9awonT5gC, reliable, because it's not on ISFDB and the publisher seems shady judging by the note in their record here. The author did the other 2 Ultramarine non-fiction books entered on ISFDB. None of the 20 Lion Books on ISFDB have the day entered as part of their date, so if it's reliable then the days could be entered. --Username 11:54, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Borderlands 2

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?302701; I've mentioned at least once on these boards that a few years ago I picked up a very new-looking copy of the White Wolf edition of the horror anthology Borderlands 2, even though it came out way back in 1994. That still puzzles me, but today while entering/fixing some stuff for White Wolf Borderlands editions I thought I would PV my copy, only to find out that it seems to not be quite the same as ISFDB's, having the same ISBN but a "printed in Canada" on the title page and an additional $6.99 Canadian price on the back. More importantly, in my copy every story from "Androgyny" on p. 92 to "Slipping" on p. 259 actually begins 1 page ahead of what the contents page says, and the book actually ends on p. 280, with a 1-page About the Editor, an ad for the HC of Dark Destiny, and a 6-page extract from In the Forests of the Night. White Wolf, as anyone who's done any edits for their books here surely knows, were an insane mess in many ways, so I'll ask if anyone owns the copy on ISFDB with just the American price so that it can be verified that this shoddy page numbering is not just Canada's fault (unlike J. Trudeau) and it can be fixed here. --Username 14:24, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Error when submitting Make Variant option 1

I got this error when submitting a Make Variant option 1. The request is in the Pending Queue as this submission.

<type 'exceptions.AttributeError'> Python 2.5: /usr/bin/python Tue Aug 16 15:29:15 2022 A problem occurred in a Python script. Here is the sequence of function calls leading up to the error, in the order they occurred. 

/var/www/cgi-bin/edit/submitmkvar1.cgi in ()
  67                 update_string += "    <ModNote>%s</ModNote>\n" % (db.escape_string(XMLescape(form['mod_note'].value)))
  68         update_string += "  </MakeVariant>\n"
  69         update_string += "</IsfdbSubmission>\n"
  70 
  71         submission.file(update_string)

submission = <isfdblib.Submission instance at 0x8919b0c>, submission.file = <bound method Submission.file of <isfdblib.Submission instance at 0x8919b0c>>, update_string = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>\n<Is...me</ModNote>\n </MakeVariant>\n</IsfdbSubmission>\n' 

/var/www/cgi-bin/edit/isfdblib.py in file(self=<isfdblib.Submission instance at 0x8919b0c>, update_string='<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>\n<Is...me</ModNote>\n </MakeVariant>\n</IsfdbSubmission>\n')
 450                 if isinstance(self.viewer, str):
 451                         from viewers import SubmissionViewer
 452                         submission_viewer = SubmissionViewer(self.viewer, submission_id)
 453                 else:
 454                         self.viewer(submission_id)

submission_viewer undefined, SubmissionViewer = <class viewers.SubmissionViewer at 0x8de677c>, self = <isfdblib.Submission instance at 0x8919b0c>, self.viewer = , submission_id = 5392848L 

/var/www/cgi-bin/edit/viewers.py in __init__(self=<viewers.SubmissionViewer instance at 0x8deb68c>, method_name=, submission_id=5392848L)
4120                 if not self.submitter:
4121                         self._InvalidSubmission('Submitter user name not specified')
4122                 getattr(self, method_name)()
4123 
4124         def _InvalidSubmission(self, message = ):

builtin getattr = <built-in function getattr>, self = <viewers.SubmissionViewer instance at 0x8deb68c>, method_name = <type 'exceptions.AttributeError'>: SubmissionViewer instance has no attribute
Phil 15:35, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Yes, I've gotten the same thing when I've made variants in the last few days; when I look in my edit list, though, everything looks as it should. --Username 15:47, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Investigating... Ahasuerus 15:56, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
Bug identified. Working on it. Ahasuerus 16:08, 16 August 2022 (EDT)
OK, I think I got it. Please let me know if anything is still off. Ahasuerus 18:19, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Bruce McAllister

Heads up that his collection The Girl Who Loved Animals, which has no Archive.org copy, was released by Cemetery Dance as an e-book in 2012, never entered on ISFDB, so I made a go at entering it. Also, while being known for SF/fantasy he seems to have shifted into horror in recent years, with several recent stories in CD Magazine and 1 in their Shivers VIII anthology, but what may not be known here is he's contributed 3 short-short stories to their website cemeterydance.com under the Free Fiction section. Haven't read the 3rd one yet, but the first 2 are pretty creepy, especially the one about the guy who killed a lady scientist in Africa because the hyena she was studying told him to telepathically; he brought it home to America and passes the time going out at night and watching as it kills junkyard dogs. --Username 19:47, 16 August 2022 (EDT)

Alex/Al Saviuk

Alex Saviuk (9 art credits) and Al Saviuk (3 short fiction - or possibly comic? - and 3 art credits) both appear in today's birthdays, and both link to the same "Alex Saviuk" Wikipedia page. I propose to make the latter a pseudonym of the former (and variant the titles), unless anyone thinks it should be other way around? (The Wikipedia page indicates he was more prominent in the comics world, so maybe one of those name variants is more widely known there?) ErsatzCulture 08:41, 17 August 2022 (EDT)

Making Al the pseudonym of Alex is i.m.o. the most logical solution. --Willem 09:56, 17 August 2022 (EDT)

Also, can anyone with knowledge of Dutch sanity check that "Bouke IJlstra" is a correct use of capitals, rather than an artifact of sloppy shift key usage? A very cursory skim of Wikipedia indicates the former, but I'd defer to anyone with relevant expertise. (May be worth having an author note to explicitly state that capitalization is correct?) ErsatzCulture 08:41, 17 August 2022 (EDT)

Yes, this was on purpose. The Dutch "IJ" is considered to be one letter and is one of the things that make Dutch a difficult language. --Willem 09:56, 17 August 2022 (EDT)
Thanks - I've now updated both of these authors (and varianted the works for the first one) as described. ErsatzCulture 09:11, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Nightworld

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?24292; The NEL HC cover is on Amazon with somebody's junk in the background, but FantLab seems to have gotten a photo where that stuff was cropped out and the lens flare removed, so I added that here, but Bluesman, a long-gone editor, uploaded the Dark Harvest cover as the NEL PB cover and didn't size it properly anyway, so if anybody can find the NEL PB cover they can upload it and replace the wrong one. --Username 11:10, 17 August 2022 (EDT)

Pub

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?2534; I added pub. series # to Death Guard based on dustjackets.com spine and the list at seriesofseries.owu.edu, then noticed 2 of the books weren't on that list, so I added (Hutchinson) to their 2 books to differ the series from Unwin's. Then I had a random thought; every time I do an edit it seems weird that every field starting with pub has no period; pub type, pub series, pub series #, and pub note. Is it possible to add one or would that require something major? The way it currently is makes it look like a tourist's guide to the local bars. --Username 21:07, 17 August 2022 (EDT)

Ghost of Sherlock Holmes

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?286757; I own a small number of paperbacks and I never PV some of them, so while doing that today I realized that when I worked on this Halliwell book long ago I wrote a note about the Academy Chicago sticker on the back, only realizing now with more experience here that it's actually the American edition, so I deleted the note. What's interesting is that while looking at this I saw that while my copy has a sad little white sticker on the bottom left corner of the back cover with American publisher and price, the copy on Archive.org, which I assume I linked to back then, has a gigantic medieval-looking thing on the back with the publisher name/address and a white sticker with just the price. So if anyone thinks that copy really needs to be entered here as a separate edition it's available. I don't think there's any differences in the book itself as far as the stories or anything else; it's one of those "we can't be bothered to print new info so we'll just stick the details somewhere" type of thing. --Username 18:27, 18 August 2022 (EDT)

Curtis Books ID

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/view_submission.cgi?5391717; I'm going to make another edit simply adding the PDF scan, but I'd like to point out that if the mod's rejection note is correct then someone should let the editors who entered the five dozen or so other Curtis entries with full ID here that they entered the ID wrong, too, many of which are PV. EDIT: I just went to make that edit and discovered it was already there, because after rejecting my edit the same mod made his own edit adding the PDF link himself (and for some reason included the entire PDF URL verbatim in the Note to Moderator), so now it looks in the Edit History like he's the one that found it. Wonderful. --Username 13:56, 19 August 2022 (EDT)

Night Screams

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?187393; The collaborations between Pronzini and Malzberg have had copies added to Archive.org over the last few years, and this one has a weird note where the editor, Mhhutchins, who PV way back in 2007, determined the month was May by oddly using the date stamped on the library copy at the back; I see a March 1 date on Kirkus Reviews and Amazon, but don't really see May anywhere, so if any mystery experts can determine the exact date, it's probably not May. I've fixed the cover art date to May to make everything the same, but of course if the exact date is determined all the fields will have to change. --Username 15:01, 19 August 2022 (EDT)

File 770

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?28984; In a weird sequence of events today, while adding prices and page numbers to Gerald Kersh books I saw there's a publisher called London Books that reprinted his 1938 novel Night and the City in 2007, and while adding the Archive copy I also entered the intro by John King. Somehow there's only one John King on all of ISFDB, and even that's a pseudonym, but I saw somebody named John King Tarpinian in the name search list and being an unusual last name I clicked on it, and noticed 1 of the essays he wrote had 2 obviously misspelled words. Checking the file770.com PDF of the December 2014 issue I learned there were several other spelling mistakes so I corrected them all in an edit, but I didn't do a thorough check so there might be more. The Edit History doesn't reveal who entered the contents, but as can be seen at that link above, there are many, many issues on here, so I have a feeling there are probably many more mistakes. --Username 19:34, 19 August 2022 (EDT)

Best SF Two (1)

https://archive.org/details/bestsftwoscience0000cris; Someone uploaded this recently, called it Best SF two, it's actually the first in the series, price-clipped with a Faber sticker on front flap, I just added the Archive link but if anybody owns a copy of this 1969 printing they can always add the real price. --Username 20:00, 19 August 2022 (EDT)

RHCP

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=rhc&type=Publisher; There's 400+ RHCP but also 22 RHCB, all of which should probably be RHCP; also, 6 of those 22 have page numbers entered even though they're e-books, which I don't think is correct. --Username 09:47, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Personally I'd be wary of rushing into changing these. Loads of UK ebooks are listed on Amazon/Kobo/penguin.co.uk as being from "RHCP Digital", but if you look at the title pages, in many cases - quite possibly the majority I suspect - it's actually Penguin, Puffin, or one of their umpteen other imprints list. Example. Cornerstone (Digital) is another name that PRH use to make life difficult example
I only came across a product listing using "RHCB" in recent weeks - probably because I've only recently ventured into trying to attack the backlog of kids books that Fixer never submitted - but I don't recall what was actually listed on the title page when I looked up the preview on Amazon. I absolutely wouldn't automatically presume it anything listed with RHCB would be RHCP though. Fortunately 22 pubs shouldn't be an overly onerous job to check the previews on individually, not that I'm volunteering to do it personally ;-)
I have been tempted to add publisher notes for RHCP Digital, Cornerstone Digital etc saying that pubs listed against them may be misleading - I dunno what anyone else thinks?
Agree that the page numbers are probably wrong, unless those pubs are PDFs or similar, in which case that should be mentioned in the note. (Off the top of my head, I don't recall seeing any PDF ebooks from PRH, but it doesn't strike me as completely infeasible if they're kids picture books, and I know Bloomsbury lists PDF ebooks for current titles on their website, even if I've never gotten round to submitting any as yet.) ErsatzCulture 10:11, 20 August 2022 (EDT)
I decided to try one and picked the only collection out of the 22, R. Westall's Break of Dark, and found it on Amazon India with the wrong cover, but Look Inside revealed that it is RHCP, so I fixed that. --Username 10:29, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Chaz/Charles Brenchley

Chaz Brenchley is an author with (mostly) prose works from 1991 onwards. He is listed as being born in 1959 in Oxford, and legal name of Charles Brenchley.

Charles Brenchley has some fanac (letters and reviews) between 1977 and 1979. His letter in Matrix #15 is scanned on fanac.org, and (a) has a contact address of Oxford, and (b) not to put too fine a point on it, looks like it was written by a stroppy teenager.

Any objections to making the latter a variant of the former? The 12 year gap in (recorded) activity might indicate different people, but everything else points to them being one-and-the-same. (NB: his personal site says "I sold my first story for £36 in 1977 and for the next 10 years writing for teenage and women's magazines and children's comics was my bread and butter.", which seems a plausible explanation for that gap.) ErsatzCulture 10:37, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

In a 2014 interview, Chaz Brenchley said:
  • I’d known about fandom since I was a teenager, but it was mostly something that happened somewhere else, and required money I didn’t have, and social skills that were not at my command. I had friends who were quite heavily involved with the BSFA and fanzines, and I did some work with them, but I never went to anything - until I moved to Newcastle and actor-friends from Oxford phoned to say they were involved with a play at this SF con in my new city and could they come and stay with me to save the hotel costs? ... That was Mexicon in 1984.
This tells us that he "did some work" with "BSFA and fanzines" as a teenager and that he lived in Oxford until he moved to Newcastle in the early 1980s. Overall, I think it's more than enough evidence to support the notion that they are the same person. Ahasuerus 14:03, 20 August 2022 (EDT)
Thanks for digging that out. Assuming no-one raises any objections in the mean-time, I'll do all the necessary varianting tomorrow. ErsatzCulture 16:17, 20 August 2022 (EDT)
The author link has been done, and all the titles varianted to the parent author. ErsatzCulture 10:21, 22 August 2022 (EDT)

Battlefield Earth Cover

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?3704; There's more than 1 active PV, and it's clear that's the wrong cover because the sticker says soon to be a movie and that was in 2000, so original 1984 cover needs to replace it. They reprinted so many of this loon's books over and over again that it may be difficult to be sure which is the original. Oh my God, now that I've called him a loon online the Scientologists may come for me. Oh well, at least I'll get to meet Travolta. --Username 10:40, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Witchdame

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1121377; Berkley edition uploaded to Archive in '10, PV didn't link so I added OL ID but artist is spelled MEITZ on copyright page, a search of text contents on Archive revealed it's the only "by Don Meitz". PV barely responds to anything anymore, so if another mod wants to change it or contact him somehow; Don Maitz has extensive ISFDB credits but the only alternate name listed is Maitz. EDIT: https://archive.org/details/magicon-worldcon/Abracadabra%20--%20Program%20newsletter; 1 search result for "Don Meitz". --Username 10:52, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Cold Fear

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?885928; Someone just uploaded an Archive copy of the Brit edition; foreword as entered here says editor's foreword in the book, so I'd like to know if the American edition says the same so it can be fixed. Also, Pitman's name doesn't appear on the contents page because of the long poem title; is it the same in the American edition? In case anyone owns a copy and can say for sure. --Username 19:58, 20 August 2022 (EDT)

Littlefinger

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?14255; John D. Keefauver supposedly wrote at least 700 stories during his lifetime, and recently a collection of his stories was published. I imported the first 5 stories because they all included the D. in his name, but everything after that does not, so those will require variants and such. What's interesting is that I discovered not only that several stories had the wrong date on ISFDB, but that his story How Henry J. Littlefinger... seems to be 1 of a series of stories he wrote about that character, with another in the men's mag Knight in 1976, this odd one, https://www.nytimes.com/1980/12/03/archives/shapely-nonsmokers-seek-brainy-bikers-lonelyhearts-needs-can-be.html, and most interestingly a novel in 1992, The Three-Day Traffic Jam, the Amazon description of which mentions the character and says it's set in the future, which means it probably should be entered here; maybe I'll try using the Google copy. So if anyone can provide more info this could be made a series; anyone who owns his collection could also add a lot, because there's a couple of dozen more stories in it. EDIT: I entered the novel, pending approval, but no cover image, although the Google copy clearly has an illustrated cover which can be seen partially while searching inside the book, so a cover image must exist online somewhere. --Username 18:51, 21 August 2022 (EDT)

Masques Photos

https://fantlab.ru/images/editions/plus/big/196234_1?r=1519300680; I'm wondering if any software experts know how to cut-and-paste from an image like that one, because while most of the authors are famous genre figures with many online photos, there's also David Knoles with only the story in this book on ISFDB and Dennis Hamilton with 2, in this book and its sequel 3 years later. If so, their photos could be added to their records. --Username 21:20, 21 August 2022 (EDT)

One Footprint in the Sand, Part 2

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/ISFDB:Community_Portal/Archive/Archive50#One_Footprint_in_the_Sand; Someone just uploaded this rare book to Archive.org, so I'll finally be able to fix/add everything. I still love that cover; creepy. EDIT: Now that there's a copy to look at it turns out that the white smudge on the bottom of the back cover is actually a signature! Sadly, it doesn't match any cover artist for the publisher, William Kimber, and the copy is a ratty ex-library one that may have had the back flap ripped out, where the cover credit may have been. Damn it. However, someone here may know who it is. --Username 16:16, 22 August 2022 (EDT)

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