Four Million Words
News item dated 21 January 2013
As subtly hinted in the headline, the SF Encyclopedia site update of 21 January 2013 took us comfortably past 4,000,000 words of text. It’s tempting to produce a tasteful infographic tracking the third-edition word count since we began to record it in February 2008 (1,892,881 words), through the public launch in October 2011 (3,222,920 words) and so on to the present day (4,009,844 words) ... but we’ll spare you that, and will merely keep updating the comparisons between past and current editions on the editors’ home page [now incorporated into the main site]. However did the primitive, cave-dwelling editors of 1979 manage to summarize the sf field in just 730,000 words?
Onwards ad astra. Keep watching the skies! Five million words may seem a long way off, but after that milestone we can look forward to the utterly science-fictional total of 5,271,009.