Welcome to Infinite Anthologies (Draft About Page)

This site is due to officially launch in September 2026

This digital humanities project reflects multiple arguments, some of which you saw on the main page. It also argues that modern science fiction wasn't a natural development of literature, but was a purposive, newspaper-created genre to help sell science articles and invention advertising. Rather than just say that and point to texts, Infinite Anthologies items for each title shows that information through links, with links to paratextual materials surrounding various stories in newspapers, so that, as a researcher, you can critique my findings.

While the vintage science fiction around the world became highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in Australia, by the 1920s, had almost completely moved from newspapers to magazines, it is its newspaper golden age from 1890s onwards that formed all the recognisable genre markers we take for granted in science fiction today. i.e. If newspapers didn't need fiction to promote advertising, science fiction wouldn't exist. It would have gone the way of so many other genres that had disappeared by the 1910s. (A more recent analog would be TV soap operas wouldn't exist if TV networks didn't need something to help them sell soap powder.)

Creating a user account will give you access to exporting your very own custom anthology as a pdf. The plan is for an AI cover to be created for each custom anthology so that you have your very own unique collection. I estimate this feature should be ready by September 2026. 

In an effort to make Vintage Science Fiction by early Australian writers available to as many people around the world as possible, stories will be formatted for A4 (standard page size in Australia) for easy printing, so that you can give copies to people who don't have internet access. (Did you know approximately 33% of the world still don't have internet access?)

The main focus of IA is on stories that were originally serialised in Australian newspapers between 1901 and 1939. Thanks to the Australian Newspaper Fiction database 'To Be Continued' (TBC) it was possible to locate details of several Vintage Science Fiction Stories. Using various methods and tools used in Digital Humanities, including my own method of keyclouds, as well as creating an Automated Popular English Fiction Genre Classification System (APEFGCS), I was able to find a lot more in the TBC database.

The TBC database extracts OCR'd newspaper fiction sections from the National Library of Australia's archive of newspaper pages in Trove. Once I had found all the vintage science fiction stories I felt I could find with these tools, using my own edited and grouped copy of the TBC sql database, I turned to Trove to locate missing chapters and find more stories. I extended it to finding new vintage science fiction from newspapers from the period 1825 to 1954. This enabled me to locate over 200 serialised and short vintage science fiction stories, many of which haven't been in print since their first publication.

I then chose around 50 stories I could reasonably determine were written in Australia, and manually fixed poor OCR on every chapter, with reference to the original newspaper print images on Trove. Where words were invisible in the original image, I drew on my 20 years as a private English as an Additional Language (EAL) tutor, and chose the most appropriate word for the sentence, adding a footnote in the story record justifying my word choice.

The stories were not only serialised as separate chapters in multiple newspaper issues, but in some cases, the chapters were also broken into instalments. All these needed to be found, then put into the correct order.

While the main focus of the thesis is 1901-1939, to fill in various gaps in Australian vintage science fiction history, I will also add so far the first Australian science fiction story along with some select stories from the 1800s.

So, with all parts assembled, edited and available in an easy to read, downloadable and printable format, Infinite Anthologies is currently the only place on Earth where you'll find a complete version of several of these vintage science fiction stories from Australian newspapers.

Many thanks for your interest in the Infinite Anthologies website. - Neil

About Neil Hogan

Neil Hogan is an academic and researcher specialising in early twentieth-century Australian science fiction, with a particular emphasis on stories published in newspapers between 1901 and 1939. His work contributes to the fields of Digital Humanities, Science Fiction Studies, Genre Theory, and Science and Technology Studies (STS), offering a rigorous examination of how speculative fiction intersected with popular science reportage in Australian print culture during the Federation era and interwar period.

As curator and editor of Infinite Anthologies, a scholarly edition of a literary ecosystem, Neil is assembling, annotating, and thematically tagging an archive of newspaper science fiction. His editorial approach blends traditional hermeneutic analysis with computational techniques, aiming to democratise access to Australia's overlooked contributions to early science fiction and to model best practices in digital archival scholarship.

This biography is based on a version written by ChatGPT. I asked it to analyse a year of the information I’ve been giving it and summarise what it thought would be suitable for a short bio. I then edited out the hallucinations. Feel free to contact me directly if you would like a more detailed version. - Neil

On the lower right is Infinite Anthologies Agent Neil AI which uses a digitised version of Neil's voice. Click to start a voice or text chat with IA's AI! The default of AI agents of recording all chats has been disabled for your privacy. Please consider that this AI agent can make mistakes and currently uses Gemini 2.5 to help answer any questions. In testing Neil noticed that some general questions will generate answers that combine similar vintage science fiction stories (A Trip to the Moon and The Moonman for example.) But, for more specific questions, such as the science behind a specific idea used in a vintage science fiction story, it is a little more accurate.

Legal stuff: The terms and conditions that apply to the site also apply to IA's AI. If you use this site and the AI Agent you are automatically agreeing to the terms and conditions. Thank you.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this collection has been curated, the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. I recognise the enduring connection of Indigenous peoples to this land and its waters, and I am committed to building a future of respect and reconciliation.