Progress Report and SFE Team Activity

A couple more small landmarks. On 1 August, after a fairly hefty SF Encyclopedia site update, John Clute’s personal total of entries written solo passed the 5000 mark. On 2 August, the Picture Gallery count went past 6000 images (most of the uploading and captioning having been carried out by Roger Robinson). Another six entries and the overall SFE total will reach 14,000. Onward, ever onward ...

Although the SFE may feel like a full-time job or life sentence, team members are usually very busy elsewhere too. John Clute recently reviewed Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent for Strange Horizons, and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane for The Los Angeles Review of Books. David Langford relentlessly publishes Ansible and writes for SFX; his small press Ansible Editions has released the first book versions of all Algis Budrys’s “Books” review and essay columns as published in F&SF, 1975-1993.

Several Contributing Editors have also been hard at work:

• Mike Ashley hopes despite many distractions to complete The Cyber Chronicles, fourth and final volume of his Story of the Science Fiction Magazine, by the end of 2013.
• Jonathan Clements has been toiling at his doctoral thesis on the history of anime, to be published by the British Film Institute (Autumn 2013).
• John Grant deserted us to work on his massive solo project A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir (October 2013).
• Nick Lowe continues to write his “Mutant Popcorn” film review column in every issue of Interzone, and promises more SFE film entries some day.
• Neal Tringham has published Science Fiction Hobby Games: A First Survey, based on a subset – tabletop sf gaming franchises – of his immense array of Games entries for the SFE, which gets a welcome credit.
• Gary Westfahl’s critical work William Gibson is published this month by Illinois University Press as part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, and the book’s bibliography – “it really is the first comprehensive bibliography of the author” – is available online.