The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to StarFist series. ✗plicit 04:45, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

First to Fight (novel)[edit]

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Contested WP:BLAR. Should be redirected to the series, StarFist series, which appears to be notable.

No reviews on PW/Kirkus, no relevant hits on newspapers.com. PW does review some of the later books in the series: [1]. asilvering (talk) 01:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also nominating the other early entries in the series:

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Science fiction and fantasy and Literature. asilvering (talk) 01:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete all and~~ redirect to main series. My search for reviews of the individual books came up absolutely empty. --Ouro (blah blah) 05:36, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Ouro I hope you mean "redirect", rather than delete and redirect? I don't see any reason to wipe the edit history of these articles. -- asilvering (talk) 17:19, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Asilvering Oh of course! My mistake, forgive me! --Ouro (blah blah) 13:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge and redirect to StarFist series, preserving the current content in the history for possible future use, and providing a very brief plot summary for the novels not yet present in at that target, as WP:ATD. Thanks to the nominator for providing the details on their WP:BEFORE search, which is very helpful for other participants and far too often missing in deletion discussions. Daranios (talk) 11:17, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The series is notable - the latter books, as the nominator said, are notable and have reviews in PW. The reason the other users cannot find reviews on the earlier books is because of their date of publication, the late 90s and early 2000s, which makes them difficult to find on the internet; this thus only penalizes their earlier date of publication. Nevertheless, they all have notability, and were big sellers:
- First to Fight can be found in a Top 10 Kindle sales list in 2009 [2], and has 2k+ user reviews on Goodreads [3]. Excerpts from it can be found in grammar books such as Andrea DeCapua's Grammar for Teachers [4]
- Interzone reviewed School of Fire in 1998, praising the authors' experience [5]
- Derek Buker's 2002 Science Fiction Advisory recommends the StarFist series in the Space Operas category - by then the series had only ran up to Kingdom's Swords [6].
- If I on a cursory search found these, those with access to sci-fi magazines of the era will surely find more. Cheers, Coeusin (talk) 12:47, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Coeusin I was excited you'd found an Interzone review, which I expected would be good coverage, but alas that's really, really minimal, smaller even than a typical PW review, which is the barest of bare minimums. We don't use "has sold a lot of copies" to define notability, nor do we allow notability to be inherited downwards (eg from a series to an individual book). It's very possible that earlier reviews have fallen into the black hole that is the internet/digitization policies of 1990-2005, but it's also quite possible that the series only picked up steam with reviewers later in its run. Either way, the time to find those hypothetical reviews is now. Otherwise, the better option is to merge/redirect. If in the future someone finds a pile of sources that no one found during this AfD, they can spin the articles back out. -- asilvering (talk) 17:18, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If the articles on the books were kept as articles and not redirects it would be easier to add information to them as we find it. There is information to be found, but, as with any subject in a historical field of study, this tends to be a gradual and slow process. This is harder to me because I don't live in the US, which is the main market of these books. Americans could, I'm almost certain, waltz into any mid-sized library, look into the sci-fi mags of the era and find a good amound of information. These books were published by Del Rey, which was one of the largest publishers for books of this kind, and not for nothing (the series' 17 volumes should also speak for something). But of course, as you said, these are all hypotheticals. Coeusin (talk) 17:46, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Coeusin, it is not more difficult to add information to an article on a series than it is to add information to an article on a book. Not to mention, no information has been found for most of these since their creation nearly two decades ago; if we also find no or minimal information during this AfD, it's unlikely anyone will ever come along and add it. Again, if that hypothetical does happen (no one finds notability-securing sources now, but someone does at some point in the future), there won't be any objection to de-redirecting the articles and expanding them. -- asilvering (talk) 17:55, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge to series. Acknowledging the new sources mentioned above, I don't see the bar being met for these individual books. PW is a librarian trade publication, designed to review widely to educate librarians on what to buy, and inclusion wherein does not confer notability. Anything sourced to be said here can be amply put in summary style in the main article. I can sympathize with the fact that some periodicals are hard to find but that's why we have book review indexes. @Mike Christie, would you happen to know if these received reviews in sci-fi periodicals of the era? I'm less familiar with sci-fi-specific indices. czar 17:43, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are no reviews listed here; that doesn't mean there aren't any but if any of the main genre magazines had reviewed it that would probably show up. I can't check Locus till Monday or Tuesday but will have a look then, though I'm doubtful -- Locus lists all books received but generally reviews only the most prominent. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:14, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Merge to series. After posting the reply to Czar, above, I remembered that you can look at the individual issues of Locus in the ISFDB; see here for example. So the reviews for Locus have been indexed, and they would show up on the book pages if those had been reviewed. I checked each book in the series and none have any indexed reviews in the ISFDB. I agree with Czar's comments that one or two sentence reviews amount to no more than acknowledgement of receipt and don't confer notability. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:22, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mike Christie, just to confirm, you checked all the books in the series, not just the ones up for this AfD bundle? The only books I bundled into this AfD are the ones with no outside sources, because I wanted to put up only the most obvious first. But the others don't have enough sources present in the articles for individual notability either, as I recall. -- asilvering (talk) 23:11, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I checked all of them. None had any indexed reviews. ISFDB only indexes genre review sources, but very few publications that are not genre sources are likely to have reviewed these. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:29, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.