Crammed With Enough Information to Fill the Universe : Literature: Coming in at 1.3 million words long, the new edition of “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” searches for order in an unwieldy field.

When Granada Publishing issued the first “Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,” in 1979 in the United Kingdom, the editors of the landmark 730,000-word tome complained that the field had become far bigger than anyone had suspected.

“We initially imagined,” wrote Australian Peter Nicholls and London-based Canadian John Clute, “that it might be possible to put everything in, all the relevant facts. We were almost instantly disillusioned.’

Nearly 15 years later, the long-awaited second edition of the Hugo Award-winning reference is out, from Little, Brown and Co. in the U.K. and St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. Priced at $75 (a soft-bound American edition and a CD-ROM disc are forthcoming), the new edition weighs in at 1.3 million words. The editors are no longer disillusioned by the scope of the field. They are reeling.

“SF has grown impossibly large,” said Nicholls in an interview at the World Science Fiction Convention held recently in San Francisco. “I found it very daunting. The last two years were spent at the edge of a precipice, and I have been drained by the effort. I don’t believe I would do it again.”

In 1979, said anthologist and teacher David Hartwell, science fiction was like baseball before expanding into Montreal and Toronto or ice hockey before San Jose or Tampa Bay bought their franchises.

Science fiction now runs a bewildering, and increasingly fragmented, gamut that includes movie and TV spin-offs, graphic novels, young-adult fiction, choose-your-own-plot stories, technothrillers, survivalist fiction, science fiction horror, fantasy with science fiction premises, prehistoric fiction, erotic thrillers and alternate histories.

“Until the early ‘70s,” said Hartwell, “SF was still knowable. One could have read all the masterworks, be conversant in the styles of the major authors and many of the minor ones, know the publishing lines and the magazines. By the 1980s, however, SF had become largely unknowable. One of the impressive things about the new encyclopedia is that it makes SF knowable again--somewhat.”

Although recognized in 1979 as the finest reference in the field, the first volume was occasionally faulted for its smart-aleck tone. Critics also expressed distress over the cacophony of voices emerging from its pages, the editorial eccentricities of some of the contributors, and, according to some Americans, excessive Anglophilia.

The editors refute the latter charge.

“We are both colonials,” says Nicholls, “and as such have been able to regard the field from an unusual and usually helpful vantage point.”

The new edition offers a more uniform and consistent voice than its predecessor because of the editors’ decision to rewrite most contributions. And, it does not include negative personal information in its biographies of authors.

“Just because we know this stuff doesn’t mean that we had to use it,” says Nicholls. “Although our British publisher was once owned by Robert Maxwell, we didn’t want to produce a tabloid encyclopedia. It may well be that a writer is the sum total of all that he or she is about. But what we judge them by here is their writing.”

Questions of editorial judgment remain. The entry on Harlan Ellison, for instance, is embarrassingly fawning, given his failure to contribute a single novel to a field largely shaped by novels. The entire continent of South America is reduced to a single entry.

In its favor, the editors have made the new edition as opinionated as the first. The current buzz characterizes this as an encyclopedia with attitude, riveting though unwieldy bedside reading. In what may be a first for reference books, the hip magazine Entertainment Weekly heralded “The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” as a must browse.

“Encyclopedias are usually unreadable,” said Nicholls. “This one is designed as a history as well as a series of entries. And you can’t write a history of that field without fairly strong opinions. We did try to keep them down, but it’s like working in a vacuum if you try to make everything completely objective. And nothing is ever completely objective, because the mere length of an entry reflects a value judgment.”

“The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” is probably the last of its ilk, say Nicholls and others. Although enjoying a new golden age, science fiction has grown too big and too fragmented to quantify in any meaningful way.

“Doing an encyclopedia like this is like trying to take a snapshot of a moving wave,” says Nicholls. “You want to freeze the molecules. But it can’t really be done, because the molecules change even as you watch it. In the case of SF, the field has lost its uniformity, and the molecules seem poised to fly off in all directions.”