We have recently started work on an interstellar bibliography. This is a collection of papers on the subject of interstellar fight, interstellar travel or otherwise known as interstellar studies. Hence it is called the Interstellar Studies Bibliography or ISB. This name comes from the famous red cover issues of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society which were published between 1974 and 1991.
In the past others have attempted to create such a bibliography and this was done by Robert Forward and Eugene Mallove in addition to others. It was known as “Interstellar Travel and Communicaiton: A Bibliography”. Their work was very comprehensive and in June 1980 had recorded a total of 2699 references to articles, books and reports discusing the problems of interstellar travel and communication.
They also went to the next level and sub-divided the bibliography into subjects, which included:
General discussions of interstellar transport.
Proposed methods of interstellar transport.
Relativistic effects.
Interstellar vehicle issues.
Life-supporting extrasolar environments.
origin of extrasolar life.
communicating with extrasolar intelligence.
Radio search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI)
Non-technological discussions of interstellar travel.
Multiple topic books.
Compendia.
Bibliographies.
Miscellaneous.
They then further divided each of the subjects into sub-categories, but we won’t list those here. We are not yet sure as to what level we will go with the ISB but for now our task is to collate the references and then when we have assembled them, assess how to further improve it. This is obviously a large challenge and some of the subjects included in the original bibliography may be excluded from the present one (e.g. exosolar planet issues) simply due to the vast number of papers and articles that exist on the subject.
For now we are listing published books, journal papers, conference proceeding papers, white papers, team reports, graduate thesis, popular magazine articles, science fiction novels and a list of contributory authors. In addition, we supply some visual graphics of the covers of some of the seminal publications, and these are important because they help to depict some of the fantastic visual imagery.
We will continue to build in new content in the weeks and months ahead and we already have other pages ready to go live, such as a list of films, community meetings/events and a list of organisations that have played some role in this field. You will also notice that many of the pages are accompanied by a chart of data which shows the trend in the number of publications over time and perhaps nicely illustrates when the community has been active or not so active. We are currently analysing this data and will shortly be publishing a review of it, as an indication of interstellar research eras.
To find out more about the Interstellar Studies Bibliography, simply visit the pages on this web site which are continually updated and under construction: