About this Project

The following page contains a "rough" list of science fiction and fantasy novels from the 1970's. I call it a rough list because assembling a complete list is a challenging task that I may never complete. In order to build the list, beginning with Hugo list, I dug through databases, such as Goodreads, gleaning what information I could. Yet, even those databases aren’t complete, with many books having no descriptions and just as many books having no dates. The most well known books are documented fairly well, but lesser known books are documented in a hit-or-miss fashion.

Compiling this listed of 70's SF and Fantasy novels raised substantial questions for me. What exactly is a science fiction or a fantasy novel? How far from reality can it go before I add it to this list? How silly can it be before I exclude it? What about early computer and role-playing games? Should they be included? I chose to dodge most of these questions by including everything, no matter how slim the pretext. I am not a gate keeper deciding which books are “real” science fiction and fantasy and which aren't. I hold young adult titles and TV adaptations with the same esteem that I hold Heinlein and LeGuin. My goal here is to give you the full tableau of these genres in the 1970s, and hopefully pointing out some "new to you" authors to read. However, due to space limitations and generally wanting a life, I have avoided children's books.

This list itself isn’t copyrighted as it is freely available data. Data can’t be copyrighted. This paragraph before you is copyrighted because it’s fixed and unique. So, if you copy the list, then I give you a non-exclusive license to use About This List. You will still be ripping my work off, but I forgive you.

Assembling this information proved challenging. My first version of this list was hand curated, but I found myself unable to answer basic questions about the list. For this second version, I tackled information acquisition with PowerShell, using data from Goodreads as my primary source. The author list was still hand curated, because every effort at machine curating has failed, a limitation that I eventually hope to rectify. An additional challenge was identifying SFF vs Not-SFF titles, and English language vs. Non-English language titles. This work is ongoing. In the meantime, these lists contain both non-English titles and non-SFF titles as I opted to gather too much rather that too little.

As a goal, I want to machine curate all titles, ensuring that they are SFF. I also want to expand out my known writers by examining periodicals, using their contributors to determine if any are SFF.

Realistically, I don't think that this project will ever be finished, as I have no metric for that. My hope is to make this list substantial and useful.