Absolute Zero – Cool Websites, Very Cool

Today’s round-up of very cool websites has a theme: online resources created by fans and pros for the fannish community (and those few hardy explorers of the infinite who may wander in from time to time).

eFanzines.com is a free site devoted to electronic fanzine publication with several hundred currently published fanzines regularly posted to the site.

Additionally,eFanzines serves as a repository for scans of historical fanzines (Energumen for one, the well-received zine from Mike Glicksohn and Susan Wood.  Susan should be familiar to most from her fandom column in Amazing Stories, The Clubhouse), convention report fanzines, convention zines, British, Australian and Canadian zines.  It is also the home for fanzines produced by some of our own contributors, Chris Garcia and John Purcell among them.  (Purcell is heading up the fanzine room at this year’s Worldcon, Lonestarcon 3.)

This capture of a portion of the site’s front page should give you some small idea of the huge inventory that can be found on the site:

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia is a massive undertaking that began in 1975 and has continued through two formal editions and numerous supplements, some issued on CD-Rom.  The project was conceived and edited by Peter NIcholls;  John Clute joined Peter for the second edition;  David Langford and Clare Coney have done much of the work of bringing the latest edition up-to-date.

The SF Encyclopedia offers up listings on authors, artists, publications, things related to SF and aims to be a central repository for all SF-related data.  Here’s a portion of a sample listing:

“The magazine of scientifiction”, with whose founding Hugo Gernsback announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was initially a letter-sized Magazine issued monthly by Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing Co. as a companion to Science and Invention and Radio News, first issue dated April 1926, and was the first magazine to publish science fiction exclusively. The original title survived to 2005, through a succession of publishers, and was resurrected by a new publisher who managed to acquire the title in 2012.

The publication regime of Amazing Stories has seen great changes. Gernsback lost control of Experimenter in 1929 and the magazine was acquired by B A Mackinnon and H K Fly, who primarily after its companion title Radio News. The name of the company was modified more than once, becoming Radio-Science Publications in 1930 and Teck Publications in 1931; but these name changes were cosmetic, as they operated under the overall umbrella of Bernarr Macfadden, who was himself listed as publisher and owner from December 1931; he did not interfere with his editors. Arthur H Lynch was named as editor of the May-October 1929 issues, but his primary role was to edit Radio News. Gernsback’s assistant, T O’Conor Sloane, who had remained with the magazine, continued as managing editor and from November 1929, was granted full editorship. The magazine adopted the standard Pulp format with the October 1933 issue.

Well, what other entry did you expect me to quote? (emphasis added)

The SFE3 is an invaluable resources, pay it a visit and give it some support!

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a huge repository of bibliographic data drawn from publishers and publications; if you are looking for the issues of a particular magazine, chances are you’ll find the full table of contents listed – and not just for the stories.  Letters, cover art, publisher and other related information is usually included.

You can find the contents of virtually every SF, fantasy and horror magazine published in the English language.  Here’s what one randomly chosen entry looks like:

Galactic Central Press began as a publisher of specialty bibliographies.  It now contains what is perhaps the most extensive files of publication data and cover images for the pulps and fiction magazines in general.  In many cases the image files cover complete runs of the magazine cover art. GCP is a visual treasure.  Here’s a small portion of one page of cover images (clicking on a cover brings up a large-sized rendering of the image).