About Worlds Without End

Worlds Without End is a web site, and a growing online community, dedicated to identifying, reading and sharing the best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels the genre has to offer.

Worlds Without End brings together the complete listings of novels, authors and publishers for 10 major awards in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature: Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction Association, Locus Science Fiction, Locus Fantasy, John W. Campbell Memorial, British Fantasy Society, World Fantasy Awards, Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke.

Yes. We plan to continue expanding our awards base until we run out of significant best novel awards to cover.

Our next expansion will bring in the Bram Stoker Award (we're a little thin on the Dark Fantasy/Horror). After that, possibly the Ditmar Award. No promises though.

As a practical matter the WWEnd team members only speak English, as do better than 99% of our visitors. Add to that the dismal availability of foreign language books in the US - even in translation. We'll be sticking with awards and books in our native tongue for the forseeable future.

No. While the bulk of the books in our database are winners and nominees we also cover books that are part of a series that includes a nominated book. If book three of a trilogy wins an award it's not very helpful to our members to omit books one and two. There are hundreds of non-nominated series books in our database and that number will continue to grow until we've got them all accounted for.

A great example of series books is Discworld. Only seven Discworld books received nominations but we have the entire series of 37 books.

The ten awards we cover form the backbone of the WWEnd database. They offer a broad cross section of where the genre has been and where it's going. They show us what was considered the best of the genre at the time and give us a glimpse into years gone by. But they are more than just an historical record. They're a useful tool to help you find great science fiction and fantasy. They can lead you to try new books and authors - some you may never have heard of before, some you may have forgotten. They bring to light new up-and-coming authors you may never have found otherwise.

Of course the awards are not without their controversies and detractors. Determining "the best" in any art where personal taste is so subjective is always going to create controversy. Every award has it's pros and cons. Selection process, qualification criteria, voting procedures, regional biases, author celebrity plus many other factors can affect the outcome of any given award. They are as flawed as the passionate people who run and participate in them. That does not mean they are without merit... just that their inherent limitations have to be kept in mind.

By covering many different awards we hope to mitigate some of these issues. We don't suggest that anyone ONLY read the award nominated books forsaking all others. We hope that visitors to WWEnd will use the awards as a tool to find new books and authors to read just as they use book reviews from trusted sources, recommendations from friends, gut instinct and whatever other tools they would normally employ when book hunting.

We consider the awards a great jumping off point that will give you a better than average shot at finding a good read. Maybe even a great read.

This is one of the most asked questions we get, often in angry or accusatory tones. The simple answer is that your favorite author was not nominated for any of the awards we currently cover. That's it. There's no conspiracy to defraud your favorite of their rightful place in the annals of SFF.

As we add more awards we'll be adding more authors along with them. Please be patient and try to understand that data collection is time consuming and often difficult. We like to think that with over 500 authors to choose from you might find a new favorite if you look around a bit.

The WWEnd database is built around the award nominated books so we don't have every book by every author in our system. We have all the books that received a nomination from the 10 awards we currently cover and we are in the process of adding series books to complete any series where at least one book was nominated for an award. We will eventually expand that to any and all books by our nominated authors but we are limited by time and resources and there are thousands of books still to add.

The data contained within WWEnd is as accurate as we can make it given our limited resources. We make every effort to ensure our content is correct but we acknowledge that there are inevitable errors.

Our awards listings are very accurate as that data is relatively easy to come by online. Many authors provide press kit information on their web sites like bios and pictures etc. that we'll use here. We won't use information that is outside the public domain without permission and getting permission is time consuming and laborious thus the many holes in our author data. The same issue exists for our novels. Synopses are public domain and most times freely available online but many publishers/authors do not wish to share excerpts so we don't always have those.

Some things like publication information are notoriously hard to fathom. Some instances that have caused confusion for us thus far:

• The same novel can be published in multiple years by multiple publishers or imprints in multiple countries.
• Some books get different titles in different countries.
• Books get published out of narrative sequence or the author will come back ten years later to insert a new volume into a now seven book trilogy.
• Some series are listed in publication order, some in chronological order according to the narrative and some with the author's preferred reading order.
• A publishing house will have separate and distinct imprints for different books in different countries or will combine with other publishers to distribute different books under a joint name.

We are always working to make our content more complete and accurate and we encourage our visitors/members to point out any errors they find and to contribute new content where possible.

BookTrackr is a WWEnd member's only feature that helps you track the books you've read or want to read. See the BookTrackr page for complete details on how it works.

This is a great question! There are many things you can do to help Worlds Without End improve and grow. As a general answer: Get involved! Signup, post in the blog or the forums, contribute a book review, tell you friends about us, link to us etc. For more specifics see our Support WWEnd page. Worlds Without End is only as good as our members make it. It's through YOUR participation and contributions that we'll be able to grow and prosper.