Infinite Anthologies of Vintage Science Fiction

Welcome to Infinite Anthologies.

This site will soon feature an accessible, democratic public scholarly archive of Vintage Science Fiction from early Australian newspapers. It will host 10 Scholarly Editions of Australian science fiction stories, along with 40 non-editions, which can be sorted by keywords into predominant content order. You can read the stories online without logging in.

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 July 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?)

Each story will include:

A short critical description

Keyword tags

Date, origin, first publication context and editorial notes.

A biography of the author (where possible)

Links to related works and references (if known)

Footnotes exploring the science and culture contained within the stories.

The stories 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 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 visible 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.

This website is designed for anyone interested in finding out more about vintage science fiction, and also contains additional information for researchers. 

If you have any questions about the site or my research, please contact me via the form below.

A huge amount of work is in progress so if your question is just about when something will be uploaded, please subscribe to the newsletter and I'll add that information there for everyone.

Many thanks for your interest in the Infinite Anthologies website.

This site's foundation is Omeka S which I have customised. If you are creating your own digital humanities project around vintage science fiction using Omeka S, let me know through the contact page and I'll link your site.