User:Herzbube

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Current status

I am usually "working" for ISFDB in bursts of a few days or weeks, then go MIA for a couple of months or half a year. While I am "on it", there is no fixed day of the week when I will be present.

If necessary I can be contacted by email. See below for details.

My interest in ISFDB

Being an avid SF reader, ISFDB of course is on my list of useful Internet resources, alongside other services such as IMDB or Wikipedia. Since I believe in community efforts, I have always felt a diffuse need for contributing something back to those projects that I take advantage of. Unfortunately, most of the time those projects have already passed the stage where I believe my feeble efforts could make any difference. ISFDB on the other hand has opened up for public editing rather recently, so I think that my help could still be of some use.

My interest in SF

I have been reading SF&F, horror and mystery stories since my early teens, but in more recent times SF has become the main focus of my interest. I mostly read for entertainment, currently I prefer older stuff from the 1940-1970ies. I also try to get a vague overview over the history of SF, but I have no real scholarly interest in the field. Although English is not my first language (I am Swiss), I almost exclusively read my books in English - otherwise I would not be here, I guess :-)

Projects / Goals

  • Enter my not-so-big books collection into the ISFDB [first pass DONE]
  • Cleanup of Tolkien bibliography. See this sub-page.
  • Take a closer look at Aldiss' bibliography. This review of Aldiss' The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s has piqued my interest because it mentions that some short stories have appeared under different titles in US & British editions of "Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand" and/or "The Canopy Of Time" (e.g. "The Dark Millennia" also appeared as "O Ishrael"), but those stories appear in the ISFDB as completely separate title records. Something seems amiss. Dear Bill Longley's notes on this wiki page remind me to tread warily, though!
    • From my copy of Galaxies Like Grains of Sand it becomes clear that "The Dark Millennia" etc. are merely expository material that, together, form a frame story that connects the actual short stories into a sort of "future history".
    • Both the Author's Note and Spinrad's Introduction state that such a linked story arc has been Aldiss' goal from the very beginning, and that the initial publication of the short stories in the UK without the frame story (in Canopy of Time) was against the author's wishes.
    • The Author's Note provides interesting insight into the publication history, and also notably mentions that "Blighted Profile" has been rewritten for the first publication of "Galaxies Like Grains of Sand" by Panther.
  • Learn python and study the code that runs ISFDB, together with its DB schema.
  • Generate a list of "books that I own", aka shamelessly exploit ISFDB for personal benefit. Maybe I even have to help working on this feature request ☺. See this sub-page for a list of database queries.

Mini projects

Stuff that I encounter during regular editorial work and that takes more time than usual to complete.

Mini projects - TODO

Mini projects - Done

Contact

I have a confirmed email address in my Wiki preferences, so you can simply send me an email.

Links

Home:


Feature requests that I am interested in (FR list last scanned on August 12 2014)

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