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Tales of the Unexpected
Aug. 9th, 2011 07:07 amI've given in to my librarian tendencies again and signed up to edit/contribute to ISFDB. I was of course given no option, because it appears – surprise surprise – that I have my own ISFDB entry, which is awesome needed some tidying up as I certainly didn't create it myself. And I didn't go looking for myself there, either; I went searching for information on another PY, someone who may have been a little-known author of young adult SF in the 1950s/’60s. It might even be a pseudonym. Is he still alive? This guy:
I've had this book for a few years and still see it occasionally in secondhand bookstores in the UK. A small collection of three short stories, it was published by Schofield & Sims and ran for at least two impressions (1969 and 1971). It's actually not a bad-looking book as it's illustrated with duotone artwork throughout, and the stories are about interplanetary explorations that feature something rather rare for the time: a black astronaut. Apart from possibly one other short story written in 1955 ('Man Manifold') I have no idea if this PY published anything else.
The problem with the entry was that our two identities had been merged: whoever added my details unwittingly attributed them all to the PY who wrote 'Man Manifold' five years before I was born. One of ISFDb's glitches is the automatic conflation of different authors with the same name, so to create different PYs I've had to add birth years in brackets after the name. But there was no mention on ISFDB of the above book or any of its three stories, so there's now a new entry for the PY who once wrote Once Upon a Space. But wait... as I actually have no idea if he's the same PY who also wrote 'Man Manifold' they ought to stay separated until the unlikely day that their identities are ever confirmed as being one and same, although I'd say it's a fairly safe bet that they are.
So now that I've properly parsed my work from his, at the moment my own entry contains a few of my Vector reviews, an essay and just one item of cover artwork, so there's clearly much updating to be done. And given the large number of odd and occasionally rare books in my collection ISFDB will probably become a major new time sink. Oh dear.
I've had this book for a few years and still see it occasionally in secondhand bookstores in the UK. A small collection of three short stories, it was published by Schofield & Sims and ran for at least two impressions (1969 and 1971). It's actually not a bad-looking book as it's illustrated with duotone artwork throughout, and the stories are about interplanetary explorations that feature something rather rare for the time: a black astronaut. Apart from possibly one other short story written in 1955 ('Man Manifold') I have no idea if this PY published anything else.
The problem with the entry was that our two identities had been merged: whoever added my details unwittingly attributed them all to the PY who wrote 'Man Manifold' five years before I was born. One of ISFDb's glitches is the automatic conflation of different authors with the same name, so to create different PYs I've had to add birth years in brackets after the name. But there was no mention on ISFDB of the above book or any of its three stories, so there's now a new entry for the PY who once wrote Once Upon a Space. But wait... as I actually have no idea if he's the same PY who also wrote 'Man Manifold' they ought to stay separated until the unlikely day that their identities are ever confirmed as being one and same, although I'd say it's a fairly safe bet that they are.
So now that I've properly parsed my work from his, at the moment my own entry contains a few of my Vector reviews, an essay and just one item of cover artwork, so there's clearly much updating to be done. And given the large number of odd and occasionally rare books in my collection ISFDB will probably become a major new time sink. Oh dear.
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