Titles Not Included

While an attempt has been made to be as comprehensive as possible in the Science Fiction Index, a line had to be drawn somewhere and there are a number of titles you might expect to find here which have been deliberately excluded. These fall into four major categories:

1. Items that aren't really SF

The original index compiled by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento was created at a time when few other "genre" indexes had been written and, as such, indexed a number of "fringe titles", particularly in the "hero pulp" and "weird menace" fields, which has some elements of SF but do not really qualify as science fiction, fantasy or weird fiction. As these have now been fully indexed elsewhere, particularly in the Crime Fiction Index and the Adventure Fiction Index there seems no need to repeat them in this index. The titles concerned are:

2. General Magazines with "special SF issues" or related interest

The original index also contained a number of magazines which typically contained little or no SF, but which published special SF issues, or which had some related connection to the genre. In many cases other issues of the same magazine are already indexed in the Fictionmags Index so it seems sensible to exclude those magazines from this index as well. The titles concerned are:

3. Minor magazines

The SFFWF field is an incredibly prolific one and there are (literally) an unknown number of minor magazines, ranging from the fanzines of the 1930s to the online magazines of the 2010s, many of which have not even been catalogued, let alone indexed. In some cases, partial listings of these titles are available in the Fictionmags Index while in others little is known beyond the magazine title and rough publication details. Over time, hopefully, some of these titles will be fully indexed and will be added to the Science Fiction Index, but, for now, the following titles have been excluded:

4. Short Story Publishers

Since the advent of the Internet, a number of websites have published original fiction online as individual short stories, sometimes on a regular basis and sometimes on a rather more "ad-hoc" basis. In the initial confusion between traditional "print" magazines and the newer "digital magazines" there was a regrettable tendency to classify anything published online as being a magazine and a number of "titles" crept into earlier views of the Science Fiction Index even though they couldn't conceivably be regarded as magazines. Rather than "lose" the data already entered, those already entered into the index will continue being listed as magazines until such time as the indexes provide alternative support for this sort of data, but have been moved to the Fictionmags Index for convenience. The "known" publishers affected by this are listed below (with hyperlinks to the entry in the Fictionmags Index where relevant).