The short version of this post: we’ve put all 1.2m words The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) online along with The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. We hope you enjoy it. (And if you do, you might want to donate to support us.)

The longer version… The Encyclopedia of Fantasy was edited in the 1990s by John Clute and John Grant. It’s resided for a while in the same electronic format as the Sf Encyclopedia. As we updated the Sf Encyclopedia, we became aware that in several places there were overlaps between the two. (Tolkien, for instance, is surely much better thought of as a fantasy than an sf writer.) There were also cross-references between the two that we had to leave un-linked, and that nagged… So, with the kind permission of editors Clute and Grant, our technical magus David Langford set about seeing if that could be resolved.

The current implementation is thanks to an enormous amount of work from David. The FE has been added to the site in much the same way as the SFE: one entry per page, with the usual facilities to go to next/previous entries etc. Probably the best place to start is the introduction to the online edition. You can also browse a list of all entries, or just of entries by category (for instance, author, artist, theme…) You’ll see the usual search box in the right-hand sidebar. Cross-references between the SFE and FE should now work smoothly, but please contact us if you see any that don’t.

We are not updating the Fantasy Encyclopedia, at least for the moment. Getting the Sf Encyclopedia complete and accurate remains our priority. Of course, if someone wants to pay us $millions to do so, then we’re happy to talk about the idea… But for the moment, the Fantasy Encyclopedia has to be understood as being accurate up to 1997 and no further. (A few subsequent death-dates have been added.) You’ll also notice also that FE author entries don’t have the bibliographic checklists that SFE entries do.

Anyway, we all hope that you find this extra 1.2m words a useful reference. As ever, if you’d like to support us/thank us, we’d welcome any donations you might care to make.

Meanwhile, the Sf Encyclopedia has now exceeded 3.8m words. It also now has twice as many entries as the CD-Rom second edition, and new additions continue. Speaking of which, there’s an entry I have to go and write…