"Man, Bibliographies Are Hard Work"
Random Bitching
by Lawrence Person

Another issue, another bibliography. The most difficult things we produce for any issue tend to be interviews and bibliographies. The former takes hours of transcription, while the later requires lots of formatting. In past issues, the Joe R. Lansdale and Bruce Sterling bibliographies involved an additional day of work to enter the data directly from their libraries. This was a something of a pain, but it resulted in bibliographies with information available nowhere else.

Indeed, "information available nowhere else" was one of our primary reasons for doing bibliographies in the past. We considered it a service to the field. But thanks to two excellent SF bibliographic databases available on the World Wide Web, I'm not sure we need to do them anymore: The Locus Database at http://www.sff.net/locus/0start.html, and Al von Ruff's Internet Speculative Fiction Database at http://cu-online.com/~avonruff/sfdbase.html. Both are invaluable resources, and they made checking Walter Jon's bibliography a breeze.

What all this adds up to is that unless you, Gentle Reader, feel otherwise, I think NovaExpress is getting out of the bibliography business. If you feel strongly one way or another, drop me a line at lawrence@bga.com. Otherwise we'll use the space for: More Reviews! More Articles! (And maybe even a spot of fiction, now and then...)