Finding two people who can agree on a definition of Science Fiction can be a daunting task. The task which Peter Nicholls and John Clute faced in creating this definitive encyclopaedia must have been a nightmare in every sense of the word.

First published in 1979 by Granda in the UK and Doubleday in the States, the first edition was 730,000 words. It won the first Hugo awarded for a non fiction work in 1980. By the time the revised second edition from the new publisher, Little Brown, was released in 1993, the work had grown to 1,400,000 words, but lost most of the illustrations from the first edition. This revised edition collected a second Hugo award.

This latest edition from the encyclopaedias' third publisher is released in an entirely new format; the CD-ROM. The encyclopaedia was demonstrated running under Windows 3.11 at this years Worldcon in Glasgow, where it attracted a very healthy level of interest.

Version 1.0 of Grolier's Multimedia Science Fiction Encyclopaedia has some minor weaknesses, but is a very fine piece of work with much to recommend it. It will be available for both IBM PC and Macintosh.

I used a 90mhz Pentium with a double speed CD-ROM drive, a Soundblaster AWE32 as my test system for writing this review. I ran the encyclopaedia under both Windows 3.1 and Win95 without any difficulties. However, it should be noted that the Win95 taskbar should be set to 'Autohide' before starting the encyclopaedia.

The review copy of the CD-ROM was not supplied with a copy of the instruction manual, so I was unable to comment on the quality of the documentation supplied with the CD-ROM.

However, I didn't need it. Getting started with the Grolier CD-ROM is both quick and simple. It took less than five minutes for me to install the required software on my hard disc and to configure it with the required information on my computer set-up.

A lot of time and thought has been put into producing an elegant, intuitive and easy to use interface which allows the reader to quickly locate and access articles. The articles contain highlighted text which indicate the presence of hyperlinks which enable the user to quickly follow up cross references. This is a major improvement over flipping through the weighty tome of the second edition.

A simple to use yet powerful word search tool is capable of quick key word searches. For example, when 'Telzey Amberdon' was entered, the software located three articles out of the thousands in the encyclopaedia in a few seconds. However, this feature only works if the word(s) you are looking for is actually used. A similar search on 'Kimball Kinnison' failed to locate the article on E. E. "Doc" Smith, but changing the search phase to 'Lensman' achieved the desired result. This is particulary useful when searching for a book title.

Locating the multimedia presentations is just as simple, but the quicktime video 'stutters' when run on the recommended double speed CD-ROM drive. A quad speed drive produces significantly better results. The sound quality is good, but this obviously depends on the system used. The photographs and illustrations are not presented in a full screen format. Instead, they use approximately 1/8th of the screen and the resolution appears to be on the grainy side. This is more noticeable with colour artwork than with photographs.

Well over half of the articles are concerned with individual authors and editors. The article will list any known working names or pseudonyms of the subject and includes a brief bibliography of the subject's published works. (Short stories are covered in less detail than novels or collections, with only notable ones being listed.) A typical article gives an outline of the career of the subject and a discussion of the subject's impact on science fiction.

The selection of author photos and original bookcovers that I looked at are somewhat dated and in some cases poorly chosen. An example of this is the article on Frank Kelly Freas. While it contains links to a number of his bookcovers, nothing from the thousands of illustrations and dozens of covers he produced for Astounding/Analog are included. All of the articles on artists were short and recent works by the artists were rarely featured.

The video clips of various authors talking on a wide variety of subjects are interesting, if short. There are about than half a dozen film clips included. But it was entertaining to see the trailer to George Pal's 'War of the Worlds'. There were no film clips from popular science fiction television shows such as Star Trek or Dr Who. The opportunity to really use the multimedia approach in covering film and TV seems to have been missed. However, space limitations and copyright problems are probably the cause of this failing.

The collection of author sound clips is thought provoking, often giving insights into the thinking behind the written works. The collection of author photographs is of varied quality.

The addition of summaries of 300 major books in the field is likely to be somewhat controversial. There are books covered that I would have omitted and several titles missing which I would have included. Everyone will have their own opinions on what should and should not be included in a selection of 300 books from the field. But the summaries do give a idea of the range of topics and ideas covered by writers working in the field.

But those people who think that the CD-ROM version will be a slightly updated and corrected version of the 1993 edition with added video clips, pictures and sounds tacked on as an afterthought will be seriously underestimating the power of this new tool.

This work builds on the success of its predecessors and will be my first stop for answers in the SF field. I would be astonished if this is not nominated for a third Hugo.