Another reason to love the Internet: Internet SF Database

When I was about David’s age, my mom taught English at Vanderbilt Catholic High School in Houma. She gave me a wonderful science fiction anthology that was actually an English textbook. I don’t know if it was used at VCHS as a textbook (I rather doubt it) but it had some wonderful stories. I lost it a long time ago and have occasionally tried to find another copy, but I couldn’t remember the title. Back in 1993, I asked readers of the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup to help identify a few of the stories that I did remember, and that gave me a few author/title combinations. This morning, I had to idea to search for the title of one story, Fritz Leiber’s “X Marks the Pedwalk”. That led me to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (hosted by Texas A&M), the SF equivalent of the IMDB. From there, it was only about two minutes’ work to find the book: Leo P. Kelley’s Themes in Science Fiction— and then about 90 seconds later, a used copy was in my Amazon.com shopping cart. Yay for the Internet!