Re: Highlights and Lowlights - April 2024

On 5/6/2024 1:49 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <v1b49e$2mfe3$1@dont-email.me>,
Ahasuerus  <ahasuerus@email.com> wrote:

On 5/2/2024 4:03 PM, Tony Nance wrote:
>
[snip-snip]

I have "The Pirates of Ersatz" under its other title "The Pirates of Zan",
but I haven't read it yet.

>
It's ... mildly amusing but rather lightweight.

 To back up a little bit, I mentioned that title upthread after doing
a grep for "landing grid" in tall the Leinster stories in my Calibre
library.  Does ISFDB have a policy for what tags to add to a story
when it's entered?  Things like "landing grid" or "tormal" might
be useful.

https://isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Help:Screen:TagEditor describes our tagging policy:
 > Unlike most data submissions within ISFDB, there is no moderator
 > approval needed in order to add a tag -- new tags take effect
 > immediately. Once added to the Title, a tag will be displayed on
 > that Title's Bibliography page. Please do NOT add tags that spoil
 > the plot.
 > Most tags are descriptive, e.g. "space opera", "time travel",
 > "alien invasion", etc. You can also assign tags to create personal
 > lists like "read list", "verification list", etc, but moderators
 > may change the status of such tags to "private". Private tags can
 > only be seen by the tagger.
Moderators have the ability to delete tags that do not comply with
this policy.
That said, what you described in your earlier comment:
 > the Med stories are definitely in a loose setting I call the
 > "Landing Grid Universe".  This includes at least "The
 > Duplicators", "Sand Doom", & "The Pirates of Ersatz". I'm sure
 > there are others I can't grep for.
is different. If "Landing Grid Universe" is truly a shared universe,
then the best thing to do would be to put individual titles and
sub-series into it. However, SFE
(https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/leinster_murray) argues that:
 > The similarities in background from one late novel to another
 > were sufficiently numerous for these books to make up one loose
 > series – but through sameness, not through any articulated
 > central conceit.
It may be best to sort this out with the author of the SFE article
(John Clute) before reorganizing Leinster's ISFDB bibliography.
We have seen authors insert throwaway references to other series
as "Easter eggs", but it doesn't necessarily mean that they comprise
a super-series.
I am going to add a quote from the SFE article to Leinster's ISFDB bibliography for now. Thanks!