SFVIEW
SF Encyclopedia CD-ROM Viewer

SFVIEW is David Langford's alternative viewer software for the 1995 CD-ROM edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed, 1993) ed John Clute and Peter Nicholls.

SFVIEW is a 32-bit Windows application, suitable for use under Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP, and so on. It is simple to use, but still comes with a detailed Help file. I'm charging £11.75 sterling (£10 plus VAT), or US$23.50 overseas. Sterling cheques or dollar checks to David Langford, 94 London Road, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 5AU.

You can have the software sent on disk (overseas copies go by air), or download it here using the password which I will supply. Upgrades by e-mail or website download are free to existing buyers. The current version number is 1.16. Please note that SFVIEW is useless without the CD-ROM Encyclopedia!

The Grolier CD-ROM reappeared in cheap cloned form from the British firm Focus Multimedia in 1998. Having made an arrangement with Focus, I was able for some years to offer SFVIEW plus the CD-ROM itself as a bundled package. For obvious copyright and technical reasons it was necessary to send the physical CD-ROM. However, when re-ordering in September 2006 I was told by Focus that the CD is no longer produced and no longer in stock. If you can find a copy (dumped, second-hand, eBay?) I can still supply SFVIEW.

Credit Cards/PayPal. The Ansible Information software order page now has PayPal order buttons for SFVIEW. Listed dollar prices have been adjusted to cover PayPal's transaction fees.

Any queries? Click here to contact me.

To deal with the Frequently Asked Question: sorry, there is no Mac version and almost certainly never will be. The third edition of the Encyclopedia is to be published on line and should be accessible by any web browser.

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Downloads (password required)

Addenda. Besides fixing various limitations listed below, SFVIEW comes with a multi-thousand-word addenda file -- SFVIEW.ADD -- which includes further death dates from 1995 to the present day, corrections not incorporated into the 1995 CD-ROM, portions of text (some substantial) accidentally omitted from the Grolier edition, and literally hundreds of fixes for Grolier's dud cross-references. SFVIEW automatically displays addenda at the ends of over 400 entries, and silently incorporates the cross-reference corrections. The addenda file is updated from time to time. For use with the viewer, save the text as SFVIEW.ADD in the directory where you keep the main program SFVIEW.EXE. This addenda update works best with version 1.12 or later of SFVIEW.EXE, which can "understand" and implement the cross-reference fixes.

Note: although it consists of more or less decipherable text (plus nonstandard internal-format codes), this file is not a replacement for the SFE on-line corrections and updates, which apply to the print edition. Most of these appear as an appendix in the paperback, and more are incorporated in the CD-ROM update.

Complete Program. This is a Zip file containing the main program SFVIEW.EXE, the help file SFVIEW.HLP and the Addenda -- which for reasons of Langford sloth may be slightly superseded by the separately downloadable version, as above.

Withdrawn: Global Index. This used to be available as an optional download since it took some time to generate on older machines (e.g. well over an hour on a Pentium 166 system running Windows 95). But hardware has moved on, SFVIEW index build times are no longer worth worrying about, and I've removed the fiddly download option as of July 2004.

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Credits

Special thanks to Marcus Rowland for extensive beta testing of SFVIEW (he thus deserves a plug for his Forgotten Futures project, whose copious accompanying texts of Victorian/Edwardian scientific romances are great fun even if you don't want to play the game), to John Dallman for subsidizing the program development, to David Pringle for pointing out several entries badly truncated on the CD-ROM (all now restored) and to John Clute for allowing missing text and the on-line corrections and updates to be included.