Thank you for your efforts to lift the discourse on SF! Picked up three more SF reference books this month, including two you featured today. I find the online prices quite reasonable, especially for old library books. One area we may be in disagreement is graphic representations in reference books. I find timelines invaluable, using spatial presentation to give context to history. I also like a picture with an author profile.

I can't get my head around the fact that the edition I have of Nicholls and Clute's Encyclopedia is more than 30 years old at this point. My copy bears marks of having been used, abused and much loved over the years, even after the internet version was launched. The web encyclopedia can never replace the book because it's an entirely different reading experience. Whenever I look something up in the book, or casually flipping through the pages, I always stumble across multiple articles I just have to read. It's a time-sink for sure, and I doubt it's made me into any kind of "expert", it's just been hours and hours of pure enjoyment.

As a scholar by trade, I concur with everything you said about reference guides. It seems Clute's SFE is the king of science fiction reference books. I use the online version all the time. I've seen snippets of your 100 Must Read SF Novels, and what I particularly like is that for each entry you provide additional recommendations of similar works (if I recall correctly). That makes your book a kind of map one can navigate as if it was an online database, but in book format.

Thanks for the recommendations. I’m not a big fan of “book tube” as it’s overproduced and repetitive.

Your observation at (approx.) timestamp

I'm no scientist, but the fact that there are people trying to take the "science" out of "science fiction" astounds me. Great video, as always, Steve!

Thank you for this brief glimpse into SF reference, history, and criticism titles. We share a love for analytical and academic books about SF as much as SF itself. I recently finished

Thank you so much Stephen for your presentation which has inspired me to increase my own reference collection, (including your book!) though to be honest my interest is mostly pre-1980. I understand your point on images sometimes wasting space in an encyclopedia based on literature, but in 1977 I bought The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which I still use, and I think you might like. Edited by Brian Ash it starts with a flow-chart timeline of major books and their histories, then films, then magazines, Fandom from 1926, followed by television from 1948 with the timeline ending in 1976. To find something, film, TV series or author just look up the index at the back, but the body of the work is divided into themes, such as Cataclysms and Dooms or Computers and Cybernetics. Each theme is introduced with a short essay by an author familiar with it. So, Religion and Myths has an introductory essay by Philip Jose Farmer and Inner Space by A. E. van Voght. Also, you didn't mention Donald Tuck, which maybe because he is less known outside of Australia, but his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 is the three-volume reference almost all older Australians with a love of SF still use. It is more a bibliographic survey of the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction through 1968. The volumes were separately released in instalments: Volume 1: Who's Who, A-L (1974); Volume 2: Who's Who, M-Z (1978) and Volume 3: Miscellaneous (dated 1982 but released in 1983), all from Advent: Publishers; the third volume won a Hugo award.

I have the '93 edition, also Billion , Trillion ( held together with cello tape now) Bury My Heart and Cartographers, wonderful books. Got one with pictures : Science Fiction Art by Aldiss which is beautiful. Bought it in '75.

Colin Greenland & Michael Moorcock’s DEATH IS NO OBSTACLE alongside Ursula K Le Guin’s THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT-finally being reissued here in the US this May, are the two most significant SFF non-fiction works I’ve read and they’ve both improve my love of the genre.

Moo morning. Ooo that Hell's Cartographer's looks intriguing. Your videos remind me to remain humble .. . .what is it the wiser you get the less you know?

Thanks for another v interesting video. Nice to see you talk about quite a few books that are in my collection.

Now woefully out of date, "A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction" 1979 by Baird Searles (Author), Martin Last (Author), Beth Meacham (Author), Michael Franklin (Author), with an intro by Samuel Delany, was my most used reference book when I was first getting into sci-fi. It is basically a list of scifi authors, a list and description of what they've written, followed by my favorite aspect of the book, an "if you like..." which suggests authors similar in style or subject matter to ones you like.

Excellent and hugely informative video as always, Stephen. Thanks a million.

Very informative. I got the Pringle book in the early 90s and it was very formative in my reading. As you mentioned, it took my head off.

Some great reccies there, thanks. I recently bought 'The Science Fiction Source Book' because it was spoken about on one of your videos and I enjoyed it a lot. Some good visuals but some really good essays as well - I disagree with many of the ratings but that's to be expected.

Adam Roberts is wrapping up work on the companion History of Fantasy, so it will be available soon. He has been blogging about it for a while.

I love the Clute/Nicholls book, but I actually sold my first edition copy because it was falling to bits, and now rely on the on-line version, mainly because it is up-to-date. I have shelves of reference books, including a complete run of the first fifty issues of Foundation SF, which was brilliant when David Pringle and then Edward James were editors. More recent issues became too academic for me.

got mine. had it years. keep on . the truth is out there. was then but nice to know.

Preach! I got the first edition for Christmas as a kid and still have it, cover worn off and all. The second edition is one of my bibles (on the shelf next to the Fantasy edition) and has followed me over multiple moves and half a dozen states. I cannot recommend it enough--it's not only authoritative, it's also READABLE. You can sit there with it for hours, learning about your favorite authors or topics, or just poking around. Thanks fo much for spreading the word.