User:Chavey

Who Am I?
Darrah Chavey

Supporter of WisCon, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the Carl Brandon Society.

My specialty is SF by women authors, especially works before the mid-80's. For the current status of this project, see my SF Gender page.

For personal information about me, see my personal home page.

Ongoing Projects
Personal notes for projects I want to get to:  Wikipedia Links: Look at Wikipedia's Fantasy Novels, Speculative Fiction pages, Science Fiction pages, and Science Fiction Novels, and verify we include all available Wikipedia links.  Adding data from the Contento1 database. Status: Currently entering collection title data (but not contents yet).

Told to Children Series. Add titles to this series. See the publication series note there for links to books up to 1906.

Ancient works. Speculative fiction works prior to, say, 1850. See my Ancient Works page.

Women authors. Speculative fiction works by women. See my Gender page.

 Non-Fiction publication series. Series that specialize in critique and analysis of SF&F, or have some volumes on this topic. This does not include non-fiction series devoted to: SF art; specific authors; specific characters or universes. See my Non-Fiction Series page for more details.

 Scan book covers  Scan the Analog with the artist's signature  International editions of Tiptree books  Identify the genders of as many authors as possible. Goal: Authors who have published at least one book (novel, collection, or anthology) before 1980. When not apparent, and no Wikipedia page, identify enough biographical data to justify an ISFDB "Bio" page, which includes the use of a gender-identifying personal pronoun.  Photos of Carl Brandon authors </li> Compare book collection with existing data </li> Read all the ISFDB documentation :-)<BR> Geez, do I have to go through all the archives too? Probably. </li> Enter data on missing fanzines? </li> Enter any additional data from "Urania's Daughters" bibliography of women SF authors. </ol>

My FAQ: Listing sources for biographies and author info
When noting sources for Bio pages, Author pages, etc, use the Note and Ref templates (adapted and simplified from Wikipedia) to provide footnotes. They way to use them is:
 * 1) Each source note (or other footnote) should be in a separate paragraph, starting with, where <nn> represents the note number, starting at 1 and going up to as many notes as are needed.
 * 2) In the body of the biography, where reference is made to the contents of a note, insert  where <nn> represents the number of the corresponding note.

See Help:Contents/Purpose and the template pages linked above for more details.

This can also be used to list sources of the other biographical data, such as true names, birth/death dates, etc. These sources can be placed in the bibliographic page for the author. Documenting sources is really a good idea that we should do more often.

My FAQ: Awards notes
Reviewing existing awards: 1. Analog Award: All awards verified to 2012. Need to add links to several unlinked awards. 2 Asimov's Reader's Poll Award: 3 Asimov's Undergraduate Award: 4 William Atheling Jr. Award: 5 Aurealis Award: 6 Aurora Award: 7 Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award: 8 Balrog Award: 9 Ray Bradbury Award for Dramatic Screenwriting: 10 Carl Brandon Society Award: etc.

Integrating other Awards databases into ours: <ul>www.sfsignal.com, checked out in chronological order up to March 14, 2006. Incorporate data from the Locus page (old style). Incorporate data from the Locus page (new style). Incorporate data from File 770. Incorporate data from Wikipedia. </ul>

Honorable mention discussion:


 * 'Honorable Mention' is award level 93. BLongley 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * For the 2004 awards, I changed all of the "Honorable Mentions" to "Level 93". But they still don't show up as Honorable Mentions. The only change seems to be that now if I try to "Edit an Award" on that page, those 4 books don't show up at all! Chavey 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * They do show up, but only on certain pages: Author Award Bibliography for instance. BLongley 12 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The thing that I find frustrating is that if I go to the 2003 page for Asimov's undergraduate award, I see the three top places, then a line that reads --- Honorable Mention ---, then the honorable mentions. But if I go to the equivalent page for the 2004 awards, I do not see that line, hence lose that information. Chavey 12 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I created an artificial story title "--- Honorable Mention ---", by the author "-" and put it in as a 9th runner-up for all of these later Asimov's awards. I think it's a reasonable workaround for now. Chavey 14 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I changed how I handled the "Honorable Mention" separator, using dummy awards instead of a dummy book (with lots of awards!). I can't make it italic, but at least it's not clickable, so I think it looks better. Chavey 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Awards not exclusively SF:

New Award: Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award


 * I added a new award to the "Awards" page. Of course we can't yet set the award links quite the way we would like to, since it's not in our short list of awards, but since there's only one category for this Award (that we care about), I just did a direct link to the winning book, instead of to an "Award Page", and then added the award mention to the Notes (since it's not generated automatically). Of course we'll be able to fix that eventually. But another point is that this award is an example where the award is not a "Spec Fic Award", but has often been given to a spec fic book. So I think we'd eventually like to include such awards, and I was hoping you could take a look at what I did and see if you think this is a reasonable approach (and goal). Chavey 6 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I think this is reasonable, and would be a good example of how to deal with awards that we don't want to cover exhaustively, like "Newberry medal" or "Smarties Award". BLongley 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Some stock replies
A Title Series has connections between the universe and characters from one book in the series to another, and has the property that even if the book was republished with a different title and by a different publisher, it would still "belong" to that series. (Think of "The Earthsea Trilogy" or "Chronicles of Narnia".) A Publication Series has to do with how a book is packaged, or presented, by the publisher. Specifically, if the same collection were republished with a different name, then it wouldn't "belong" to the series, which is the conclusive evidence that it's a Publication Series. Consider a book like Arkham Horror: The Lies of Silence. The phrase "Arkham Horror" is right there on the cover, and could be viewed as part of the name. But it's definitely part of an "Arkham Horror" series. But the universe the story is set in is The Lord of Nightmares. Now imagine that the book went out of print, and the author decided to publish it himself. Then it wouldn't be part of the "Arkham Horror" series anymore. But it would still be part of the "The Lord of Nightmares" universe. And that's what makes it part of "The Lord of Nightmares" Title Series, and part of the "Arkham Horror" Publication Series: The title series is a permanent identification, based on content, while the publication series is dependent on the way the book was published. The confusion, I suspect, comes because of our use of "Title". To us, that phrase refers to something at a more general level than an individual publication, and largely independent of the "title" giving to a book.