Index to Science Fiction
Anthologies and Collections,
Combined Edition

by William G. Contento

Copyright © 2015 by William G. Contento

INTRODUCTION

This Index is intended to be a standard reference for locating stories that have appeared in English language science fiction anthologies and collections of stories by one author. For inclusion in the Index a book has to contain at least three stories. Anthologies have to contain mainly science fiction stories, while collections have to be written by authors associated with science fiction. Also covered, although not as thoroughly, are science fiction novels re-written from three or more stories.

For the purpose of this Index a science fiction story is defined as one which deals with social and technical extrapolation and innovation. Excluded are books that contain stories which deal exclusively with horror, the weird, ghosts, mythology, sword & sorcery, the occult, and other fantasy. Of course there are always stories that fall into a gray area between fantasy and science fiction which should be included in a work of this type. For books containing such stories the following rule is used: where there is any doubt, the book is included. Also included are several books having only two stories or stories that do not meet our definition of science fiction, which are added to maintain completeness with previous reference works.

This Index began, as many other specialty reference works have begun, as a catalog for a private collection of books. As I accumulated science fiction anthologies and collections I found more and more stories being duplicated, and I also found it difficult to remember which book contained a specific story. As the collection approached 800 books (in the middle 1970s) I decided to index the stories, and having access to computers through my work, I used that medium. When the Index was complete I showed it to friends who knew of similar works and pointed out that the Index contained more information than previous references. Cole covers 227 books and Siemon 237. Collins lists a like number of books, many fantasy. I was encouraged to expand the Index and make it available to the public. I began adding new material and showing the Index at science fiction conventions until it had evolved to the point where it was ready for publication.

Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections was published by G.K. Hall in 1978. That volume indexed some 2,000 books containing 12,000 stories by 2,500 authors, and attempted to cover all English language books published through June 1977. A second volume, Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections: 1977-1983, was published by G.K. Hall in 1984. This continued the Index through 1983, adding some 1,000 new books.

This edition of the index combines the information from the two books, incorporating many enhancements, corrections, and additions. There is still work to be done in bringing the data up to the level of later bibliographies, primarily in the addition of page numbers and book publication details. This version will be updated periodically as changes are made. An index to anthologies and collections published after 1983 is available on the internet in The Locus Index.

The data from the first volume of this index was originally entered on punched cards and stored on a reel of magnetic tape. As computers evolved so did the data, and after passing through several supercomputers it ended up on a pc. Hopefully you will find this version more readable than the original, which was printed in all uppercase with few punctuation characters and thousands of abbreviations. The second volume was originally composed on a Z80 based computer with output to a daisy-wheel printer.

Please send all comments, suggestions, corrections, etc. to:
wgcontento(at)gmail.com.

Go to the Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections Table-of-Contents.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance and encouragement in preparing this Index:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A NOTE ON THE DESIGN OF THE INDEX

These pages are designed to give the feel of reading a book, as opposed to database programs that retrieve selected information. The starting point is the Table-of-Contents, which has links to the major sections of the index.

For author indexes, the first link goes to a table of links to the lists of author names. Each table entry gives the first and last authors in a list. Selecting the table entry gets you to an author list where you can scroll down to a specific author. Clicking on the author brings up the main entry for that author.

With this method any author is three clicks and a little scrolling away from the Table-of-Contents. It is not necessary to type in the author's name. This click and scroll method also allows you to see the information that comes before and after your main point of interest.

The title indexes work in a similar fashon:

The Title Entry contains a link to the detailed information in the Author Entry.

If an author appears in both the Book and Story Lists there is a link to go from one to the other. If a book contains stories there is a link to the book's table-of-contents. The Story List also has links to a book's table-of-contents for stories by each author in the book. From the table-of-contents there are links back to the Book and Story Lists. The Author Lists also contain links to co-authors and pseudonyms.

To speed page retreival pages are limited to a length of about 32,000 characters.

Table-of-Contents