Format: PC CD-ROM
ISBN 0-7172-3999-3
Publisher: Grolier Electronic Publishing
Price: £44.99
John Clute and Peter Nicholl’s award winning The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction is possibly the best book written about science fiction. There’s one problem: it’s 1400 hundred pages (and more than 4 lbs) of bookcase filling small print. Luckily for those of us who’re running out of book space this new, expanded, multimedia edition fits neatly onto 5 inches of silver plastic. A CD-ROM has been promised ever since the book came out in 1993, and Grolier’s multimedia edition of the encyclopaedia is well worth the wait.
Unlike many CD-ROMs The Encyclopedia is easy to use. Installation is quick, and it runs well on any multimedia PC. Once you’ve installed it, it’s as easy as clicking a mouse button - which is something you’re going to do a lot of as you explore this CD-ROM!
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s main title screen lets you start your explorations with a tour of six of science fiction’s main themes: space, time, the alien, technology, the human mind, and science fiction itself. Each theme is introduced by a well designed digital movie, and by a series of filmed interviews with famous authors. Whilst the movies are slickly produced extravaganzas best shown to impress your friends, the interviews are well presented, and show something of both the character and the thinking of some of science fiction’s best known figures. Once you’ve watched the interviews, you can explore some of The Encyclopedia’s articles, before delving into the maze that is its bulging archives.
Each article is full of hypertext cross references that lead you around the CD-ROM. You might start off tracking down an obscure Heinlein novel only to find yourself reading about Big Dumb Objects (which turn out to be ringworlds, Dyson spheres, and other mega-structures, and not a Jim Carrey character), after a few detours via Kafka’s influences on Absurdist science fiction, Entropy and the new wave and James Blish’s literary criticism. You won’t get too lost, as Science Fiction keeps track of every where you’ve been in a history file. If you find something that you’ll want to go back to again and again, you can build up a collection of pointers to articles that you can then save for future reference.
You don’t have to explore The Encyclopedia from the article browser. A time line takes you through nearly 500 years of science fiction - taking in both Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein and Michael Crichton’s modern myth, Jurassic Park. There are plenty of links from this to one of Science Fiction’s most impressive features: the book browser. This contains synopses of over 300 of science fiction’s best known books, as well as links that compare novels that deal with similar themes or subjects. Most entries are illustrated with the book’s cover (a mix of UK and American editions), so that you’ll know what “Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede” looks like before your next trip to Forbidden Planet.
With over 4,500 articles, browsing through Science Fiction is going to lead to a lot of eye and finger strain. Help is at hand: a powerful search facility lets you track down each tiny snippet of information. Just type in your query, click on a button, and a list of relevant articles appears (we found 32 references to a certain David Langford).
There’s so much more information on this CD-ROM than in its print predecessor, that it’s probably best described as a whole new edition of The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction. Certainly, with several of the editorial team hard at work on the forthcoming The Encyclopaedia Of Fantasy, it’s probably the last edition we’ll see for a few years.
Well researched, well designed and packed full of information,Science Fiction: The Multimedia Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction is a must have for the wired SF fan. For the rest of us, it might just be a good reason to buy that computer we’ve been thinking about. And if you’re still not sure, the CD-ROM is also cheaper than the book (by a whole penny).
Originally published in SFX
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montemplar reblogged this from sbisson and added:
Simon for republishing...early 90s, when CD-ROM technology was going
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