[Ads-l] fantastic -- SFF sense (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 02:55:42PM -0400, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
> 
> Jesse's concise definition of fantastic says: "having the quality of
> fantasy", and the definition for fantasy says: "a genre of fiction
> which contains elements of magic or the supernatural, frequently set
> in a world other than our own".

Just to clarify a few things about the OED SF site: While I have always hosted
the site, almost all of the work was done by other people. Jeff Prucher's
book was based on the site's research, but he did not write (most of) the
site's definitions (the definitions in the book are his updates, and most of
these were not fed back to the site).

As for the site's current status, it's true that it has not really been updated in some time. The two main reasons are that one of the most active contributors died, and other contributors felt that the core work had been done and they moved on to other projects; and that the citations are drawn from an OED database that I no longer have access to, so they can't readily be updated. It would be possible to change the infrastructure such that the citations are a static page that could be edited normally, but I haven't had time to do this, and no one has really expressed interest.

Jesse Sheidlower

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