Bibliographer William G. Contento, 74, died on December 13, 2021 after a long battle with prostate cancer. Contento was well known in the field for its landmark bibliographies, including the Science Fiction Locus Index, and he had a long association with this magazine. His work has been invaluable to researchers and academics in the field.
William Guy Contento was born April 13, 1947 in Cortland NY. He was a computer hardware engineer and worked for Cray Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He began his career as a bibliographer with Index of science fiction anthologies and collections (1978; expanded in 1984). With Place founder Charles N. Brown, he created the Hugo Prize finalist Science Fiction in Print: 1985 (1986) and numerous volumes of Science fiction, fantasy and horror (two of which were also nominated for the Hugo Prize); the 1988 volume won an Eaton Award for best critical work. In 1999, Contento and Brown created The Science Fiction Locus Index, combining some earlier volumes into a single index, which Contento has continued to update. He also worked on the Index of criminal and police anthologies (1990) with Martin H. Greenberg. He compiled the winner of the Stoker Award The Supernatural Index: A List of Fantastic, Supernatural, Occult, Weird and Horror Anthologies (1995) with Mike Ashley, and Index to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Strange Fiction Magazines (1890-1998) (1999) with Stephen T. Miller. From 2000 he worked with Phil Stephenson-Payne on the FictionMags Index.
For more information, see his entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
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