Cataloguing Rules: How Dates and Editions Are Checked

These are the rules every entry on Genre Fiction Lineage follows: what counts as evidence, how each kind of claim is worded, and what a reader can check. An introduction to the site is on the about page.

Reading an edition card

Every entry opens with a short answer, followed by an edition card. Its fields are the same across the site:

• Work and Original title: the English title and, if different, the title first printed.
• First in print: date and venue of the earliest known printing, whether serial, book or translation.
• Author: as printed, with pen names and anonymous printings noted.
• Genre placement and Key motif or device.
• Upstream and Downstream: related earlier and later works, each labeled with its kind of relationship; “none known” is allowed.
• Public domain: US, Germany and France: one row each, with the basis stated.

The values on a card come from the same data table as the text and charts, so the card, the prose and the downloadable file agree.

Three kinds of relationship

Every link between two books is put into one of three kinds:

1. Publication order: one book appeared in print before another. A date proves this and nothing more.
2. Textual similarity: two books share a device, motif or structure. They can be compared side by side, but no line of descent is claimed.
3. Documented influence: the later author is shown to have known or used the earlier work. Only an author’s own statement, a letter, a review or an explicit reference in the text counts, including a later author's own note or preface that says the story was taken from, based on or read in the earlier work, or that judges how well the earlier work told it. A note that only lists the earlier work as a similar tale counts as a shared device.

The wording keeps these apart. “Appeared before” and “shares the device” are never upgraded to “descended from” without evidence of the third kind. Each lineage strip, the dated band of three to five works drawn in an entry, uses one line style per kind: a solid line for documented influence, a dashed line for textual similarity, and a dotted line for publication order only. Where nothing upstream or downstream is known, the strip leaves the space empty and says so.

“Earliest” always means “earliest known”

A claim that something came first is written as “the earliest known” and states its range: language, place and medium. A different range can give a different answer, and a newly found text can move the record. The site’s term for such a record is the patient-zero text.

Edition against edition

Whenever an entry discusses how a text differs from another version, it names both editions, with title and year, and quotes or describes each. A claim that an earlier text was darker is tested one tale and one pair of editions at a time. A documented softening between two named editions is called the tame edit.

Scene maps

A scene map pins each place to a sentence in a named edition, with chapter. Each map keeps three dates apart: the year in which the story is set, the date of the edition the map follows, and the date of the base map underneath. Approximate, invented or unlocatable places are marked as such, never given a false exact position, and every map has a text list of its places. Maps are textual evidence, not travel directions.

Sources and their order

When sources disagree, the order of trust is fixed: the public-domain text itself, then a readable library or union catalog record, then specialist reference works such as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, then other secondary accounts. Where sources of the same rank disagree, the entry gives both. General encyclopedias serve as leads only; a statement stays only if a named primary or readable source supports it.

Where an original document could not be read, the citation says so and stays at the level of its bibliographic details: title, date, venue. Each entry lists its sources, numbered and linked where a link exists, near the foot of the page.

Quotations, translations and the public domain

A full text is quoted at length only when it is in the public domain in all three of the site’s markets: the United States, Germany and France. In the United States that generally means published in 1930 or earlier, as of 2026; in Germany and France the general rule is 70 years after the death of the author, and France adds extensions for wartime and for creators who died for France. Translators and illustrators are checked separately from authors. If any of the three answers is “still protected” or “unknown,” the text is not reproduced.

Works still under copyright are quoted only briefly, and only where the quotation serves the argument: at most five places per work per page, each no longer than one sentence or 40 words, and no more than 120 words from one work on a page, always with author, title, edition and chapter or page.

Quotations in other languages appear with an English translation. Unless another translator is named, the translation is the site’s own and is labeled “Genre Fiction Lineage translation.”

Data tables

Timelines, lineage strips and tables are drawn from CSV data files that can be downloaded beside the entry. Each row carries its own source, and a short file beside each CSV states its source and license. Anyone can re-sort the rows, recount the totals or recompute a gap between two years. Downloads are data files only.

Images

Charts and maps are drawn from the site’s own data. Book covers, engravings, photographs and historical maps come from public-domain or openly licensed sources, each credited under the image. Illustrations made for the site are labeled as illustrations in their credit line; they set a scene, carry no evidence, and never stand in for a real book cover, a real author or a historical image.

Boundaries

Entries keep to texts and bibliographic evidence. They do not read a novel as a comment on present-day politicians or parties, and the pages on real utopian communities record history without judging or recommending any group that exists today.

When something is wrong

A confirmed error is corrected everywhere the claim appears: the short answer, the edition card, the lineage strip, tables and the CSV. The revision date in the entry’s citation block moves, a dated note goes at the foot of the entry, and the change is listed on the correction slips page. Reports go through the letterbox.