Contemporaneity of Some SF and Mystery Authors

I noticed just a few years ago that, while I had some idea of the sequence in which the early SF authors I liked had written their works, and an even weaker idea of the same for my mystery writers, I hadn't ever compared them.

This page is my first formal shot at making some of those comparisons. I particularly noticed that Doc Smith, Dorothy Sayers, and Rex Stout overlapped quite a lot.

The authors selected are ones of personal interest, though in all cases I can make at least a stab at demonstrating they're important, too. I have tried to include the best-known genre works of each author, unless those are too numerous to fit. In several cases I have ignored non-genre works completely.

Legend

For each author, the yellow bar shows the author's life from birth until their first genre work is published. The green bar is their publishing career. The red bar, if any, is their retirement. The left edge of the title of a work is located at the point it's first published according to the scale of years across the top.

That graph isn't a graphic, by the way; it's CSS positioning and background colors and things. This means people using non-graphical browsers but with the ability to display images won't be able to download it and look at it, sorry!

Last modified Friday, 02-May-2014 21:01:12 PDT
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