science

Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Internet Speculative Fiction Database rather than just read about it. In short: The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction, including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and horror fiction. The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with the database being open for moderated editing and user contributions, and a wiki that allows the database editors to coordinate with each other.

Key takeaways

Internet Speculative Fiction Database belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Internet Speculative Fiction Database to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Internet Speculative Fiction Database from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on genres considered speculative fiction, including science fiction and related genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and horror fiction. The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with the database being open for moderated editing and user contributions, and a wiki that allows the database editors to coordinate with each other. As of June 2025, the site had catalogued 2,380,108 story titles from 283,651 authors. The code for the site has been used in books and tutorials as examples of database schema and organizing content. The ISFDB database and code are available under Creative Commons licensing.

Purpose The ISFDB database indexes speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history) authors, novels, short fiction, essays, publishers, awards, and magazines in print, electronic, and audio formats. It supports author pseudonyms, series, and cover art plus interior illustration credits, which are combined into integrated author, artist, and publisher bibliographies with brief biographical data. An ongoing effort is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database, with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100 percent.

History Several speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from 1984 to 1994 by Jerry Boyajian, Gregory J. E. Rawlins and John Wenn. A more or less standard bibliographic format was developed for these postings. Many of these bibliographies can still be found at the Linköping Science Fiction Archive. In 1993, a searchable database of awards information was developed by Al von Ruff. In 1994, John R. R. Leavitt created the Speculative Fiction Clearing House (SFCH). In late 1994, he asked for help in displaying awards information, and von Ruff offered his database tools. Leavitt declined, as he wanted code that could interact with other aspects of the site. In 1995, Al von Ruff and "Ahasuerus" (a prolific contributor to rec.arts.sf.written) started to construct the ISFDB, based on experience with the SFCH and the bibliographic format finalized by John Wenn. The first version of ISFDB went live on 8 September 1995, and a URL was published in January 1996. The ISFDB was first located at an ISP in Champaign Illinois, but it suffered from constrained resources in disk space and database support, which limited its growth. In October 1997 the ISFDB moved to SF Site, a major SF portal and review site. Due to the rising costs of remaining with SF Site, the ISFDB moved to its own domain in December 2002, but it was shut down by the hosting ISP due to high resource usage. In February 2003, it began to be hosted by the Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University. The ISFDB moved to a commercial hosting service in 2008. In February 2005, the database and the underlying code became available under Creative Commons licensing. ISFDB was originally edited by a limited number of people, principally Al von Ruff and Ahasuerus. Editing was opened in 2006 to the general public on an open content basis, with changed content being approved by one of a limited number of moderators in an attempt to protect the accuracy of the database.

Reception In 1998, Cory Doctorow wrote in Science Fiction Age that "[t]he best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains the Internet Speculative Fiction Database". In April 2009, Zenkat wrote that "it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet". Ken Irwin reviewed the site in 2006, praising "the scalable level of detail available for particular authors and titles" while also pointing out usability improvements needed at that time. He concluded by calling it "a tremendous asset to researchers and fans of speculative fiction", stating that no other online bibliographies have "the breadth, depth, and sophistication of this database". On Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll described the site as "the single best [SFF] bibliographical resource there is". Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, described the site as an "indispensable [source] of information in putting this project together", and the site was described as "invaluable" by Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann in their book, Science Fiction and Climate Change. The Chicon 8 committee gave a special committee award to ISFDB during their opening ceremonies on 1 September 2022. As a real-world example of a non-trivial database, the schema and MySQL files from ISFDB have been used in a number of tutorials. Schema and data from the site were used throughout Chapter 9 of the book Rails for Java Developers. It was also used in a series of tutorials by Lucid Imagination on Apache Solr, an enterprise search platform. As of September 2013, Quantcast estimated that ISFDB was visited by over 67,400 people monthly. The database, as of June 2025, contains 2,380,108 unique story titles from 283,651 authors.

References

External links Official website ISFDB Bibliographic Tools on SourceForge ISFDB Bibliographic Tools at Open Hub Sources of Bibliographic Information (isfdb.org)

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Internet Speculative Fiction Database claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Internet Speculative Fiction Database before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Internet Speculative Fiction Database ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Internet Speculative Fiction Database

In research: Internet Speculative Fiction Database appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Internet Speculative Fiction Database in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Internet Speculative Fiction Database is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1995 establishments in the United States, American book websites, Bibliographic databases and indexes, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Internet Speculative Fiction Database outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Internet Speculative Fiction Database in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Internet Speculative Fiction Database means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Internet Speculative Fiction Database out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Internet Speculative Fiction Database in simple terms?

Why does Internet Speculative Fiction Database matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Internet Speculative Fiction Database?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Internet Speculative Fiction Database.