Science Fiction and Fantasy writers often have the need to keep track of enormous numbers of people. Genealogy programs would appear ideal for this purpose but SF&F writers often need to be able to identify individuals by their planet (or in my case 54 individual ‘timelines’ or ‘alternative reali) and/or be able to operate multiple calendars. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts to find a program to meet my needs the closest I’ve been able get is Genopro. Other software includes GRAMPS and Agelong Tree 4.

Genopro can at times be frustrating to use, but it does allow the user to include user definable fields. So in addition to the normal:

• Place name
• Parent place
• Place category (eg university)
• Place Description
• Street Address
• City
• Zip / Postal Code
• County / Region
• State / Province
• Country
• Latitude and Longitude
• Comments

You can include additional fields like

• Planet
• Political alignment

It also has the ability for the date a chart has been prepared to be included, eg if you have a family tree and you want to see how old everyone is in 2013, just set the date to 2013. If you want to see how old they were in 2009, just change the date to 2009. Unfortunately if you have a character who died in 2012 aged 59 it continues to show the individual as dead in 2009, aged 59. Given that my Clemhorn Trilogy covers approximately 7 years of extremely bloody fratricidal civil war you can see the difficulty I have if I attempt to use the same chart for the beginning as I do end of the war.

In addition Genopro doesn’t handle imaginary calendars. Clemhorn’s Cross-Temporal Empire measures time beginning with its establishment in 1884CE, i.e. 0AE. In Genopro I simply show birth and death dates in AE and set the display date as 95AE (or 103AE for the situation at the end of the war). However other genealogy software uses the system or today’s date which makes for some extremely old character (think nearly 2000 years old).

While GRAMPS has the ability to create entirely fictitious calendars it requires a significant amount of programing skill in python (and even then the amount of instructions regarding the method are woefully lacking).

The one big problem I have with Genopro (and any other program I’ve looked at) is its inability to automatically distil a complex family tree and create something suitable for publication. Finally, however, I found that it was possible to use Excel and manually create the required family tree. See FIRST FAMILIES OF THE CROSS TEMPORAL EMPIRE (95AE).