For the moment, though, with Event Horizon gone, good professional-level short original science fiction stories (stories making their initial “appearance” in electronic form) have become rather hard to find on-line. Of the surviving sites that publish original short fiction, some of the most interesting ones include Talebones (http://www.fairwoodpress.com/), Dark Planet (http://www.sfsite.com/darkplanet/), Chiaroscuro (http://www.gothic.net/chiaroscuro/) Inter Text (http://www.intertext.com/), and E-scape (http://www.interink.com/escape.html). Most of these sites lean heavily toward horror (it’s currently a lot easier to find original horror stories on-line than original SF stories, it seems), although you will find an occasional science fiction story there as well.
There are a fairly large number of sites here and there around the Internet that archive good reprint SF stories. The British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/) is a good general site that features a very extensive selection of good-quality reprint stories, most (though not all) by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information, book reviews, and critical essays. At Mind’s Eye Fiction (http://tale.com/ghenres.htm), you can read the first half of a selection of reprint stories for free, but if you want to read the second half of the story, you have to pay a small fee (less than fifty cents per story in most cases) for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. Reprint stories (as well as novels) are also available to be bought in downloadable electronic formats at Alexandria Digital Literature (http://alexlit.com). In addition to the pro-magazine sites listed previously, there are also many SF-oriented sites that are associated with existent print magazines – Eidolon: SF Online (http://www.eidolon.net/); Aurealis (http://www.aurealis.hl.net/) Altair (www.sfsite.com/altair/); TransVersions (http://www.salmar.com/transversions/); Albedo (http://homepage.eircom.net/~goudriaan/); On Spec (http://www.icomm.ca/onspec/), but although many of them have extensive archives of material, both fiction and nonfiction, previously published by the print versions of the magazines, few of them publish original on-line-only fiction with any regularity; although magazines like Asimov’s and Analog regularly run teaser excerpts from stories coming up in forth-coming issues. Eidolon Online, which published a good original story in 1997, doesn’t seem to have published any complete on-line originals since.
(If none of these sites has satisfied your lust for e-zines, you can find lots of other genre electronic magazines by accessing http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/ Humanities/Literature/Genres/Science_Fiction_and_ Fantasy/, but much of the stuff you’ll find on these sites is no better than slush-pile quality.)
Although professional-level original fiction may be somewhat scarce, there are also many general-interest sites that are among the most prominent SF-related sites on the Internet, sites that, while they don’t publish fiction, do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds. Among the sites I visit the most frequently while Web surfing are: the SF Site (www.sfsite.com/), one of the most important genre-related sites on the whole Web, which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews but which also serves as host site for the Web pages of a significant percentage of all the SF/fantasy print magazines in existence, all of which can be accessed either directly or referenced from the Fictionhome page (http://www.sfsite.com/fiction/fichome.com.htm); Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), the on-line version of the news magazine Locus; a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, database archives, lists of links to other sites of interest, and to Mark Kelly’s short fiction-review column, which at present is the only place on the Net where you can find regularly appearing reviews of SF and fantasy short fiction; Science Fiction Weekly (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/), more media and gaming oriented than SF Site or Locus Online, but which also features news and book reviews in every issue, as well as providing a home for an erudite and sometimes controversial column by SF’s premier critic, John Clute (and which is about to undergo a major renovation as part of the new scifi.com site); and SFF NET (http://www.sff.net) a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, genre-oriented “live chats”, a link to the Locus Magazine Index 1984–1996, and a link to the research data and reading lists available on the Science Fiction Writers of America page (which can also be accessed directly at http://www.sfwa.org/). A new general review site, SFRevu (http://www.sfsite.com/sfrevu), seemed to have died late last year when, overcome with ennui, its editor burned out and gave up on it, but it’s back in business again as of early 2000, the editor having gotten a second wind. Similarly, up until a few days ago, I would have said that the extremely valuable short-fiction review site, Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent/), had died, as nothing new had been posted there from early August 1999 until mid-March 2000, but editor David Truesdale has lately resurfaced, blaming technical difficulties and a too-full work schedule for his long silence, and vows to get Tangent Online going again on a regular basis; mind, there’s still nothing new posted there as I type these words, some weeks later, but Truesdale’s reassurances at least give me some hope that Tangent Online will someday be reborn – which would be a good thing for the entire genre, as venues that regularly review short fiction are vanishingly rare, either in print or on-line. If keeping up with all this still doesn’t give you enough to do, live on-line interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi channel (http://www.scifi.com/chat/) every other Tuesday night at 9:00 p.m. EST; regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (http://www.cybling.com/); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (http://www.talkcity.com/). Genie has for all intents and purposes died, but many bulletin board services, such as Delphi, Compuserve, and AOL, have large on-line communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate. The SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10.00 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on SFF.Net, and probably on other BBSs as well.
Another way to kill time on the Net with SF-related activities is to listen to audio-play versions of your favourite SF stories. The best site for this at the moment is the long-established (by Internet standards) Seeing Ear Theater (http://www.scifi.com/set/), but coming up this year is another new audio-play site, Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), which will feature weekly hour-long dramatic programmes hosted by Harlan Ellison. And soon, you may be able to watch SF-oriented original Web TV shows on-line as well, if sites such as GalaxyOnline and scifi.com can bring their plans to fruition.
Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New York Review of Science Fiction (http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html), Nova Express (http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/), and SF Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), although most of these sites are not particularly active ones. For a much more active site, one that provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news, check out multiple-Hugo-winner David Langford’s on-line version of his fanzine Ansible (http://crete.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/). Speculations, which recently abandoned its print edition (see below) also has a fairly lively Web site at (http://www.speculations/com).
It’s worth keeping a close eye on what’s happening in this area, since the whole on-line market is changing so fast that you can miss something just by turning your head for a moment; it’ll almost certainly look very different next year than it does now.
I wonder if it’s not eventually going to be the fate of most semiprozines, both fiction semiprozines and the academically oriented critical ones, to give up their
print editions and be reborn in electronic on-line-only formats, as Tangent and Speculations have already done. Only time will tell. In the meantime, it was an uneven year in the semiprozine market, as always, with old titles dying, older ones being reborn, others falling into that silent semiprozine limbo that is usually a bad sign in this area, and hopeful new contenders casting themselves into the ring even as beaten contestants are carried out on stretchers.
The big story this year for most folks would probably be the mind-boggling rebirth of the fiction semiprozine Century, after almost four years of total silence, but since the new issue is dated 2000, we’ll have to let a review of it go until next year. (In the meantime, if you’d like to take the chance that Century won’t vanish again, and subscribe – and this was widely considered to be perhaps the best and most literate of the fiction semiprozine back in its glory days – we’ll list the subscription address below.) The long-awaited (also for years) first issue of Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society also came out late in 1999, but because it’s also dated 2000, we’ll wait to review it next year as well (and we’ll list its subscription address below, if you want to take a chance on it).
The big story in this market for last year was the consolidation of several fiction semiprozines under the umbrella of Warren Lapine’s DNA Publications, which now publishes Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction; Aboriginal Science Fiction; Weird Tales; and the all-vampire-fiction magazine Dreams of Decadence; as well as Lapine’s original magazine, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures. (Last year, it was widely reported that the Australian magazine Altair: Alternative Airings in Speculative Fiction was going to be joining the DNA group as well, but that doesn’t seem to have happened – at least, Altair is at present maintaining a separate subscription address, and a separate Web page.) In DNA Publications’s first year, Lapine has done a good job of beginning to stabilize publication schedules for the magazines, which all published more frequently than they had last year (with the exception, oddly, of Lapine’s own Absolute Magnitude), subscription rates have also begun to creep up for all of them, and Lapine is reported to be pleased with their success so far, and optimistic about the future. Now he needs to work on producing a more reliable level of quality in the fiction published by those magazines, which, at the moment, is widely uneven, varying dramatically not only from story to story within the same magazine but from title to title. The best overall level of fiction in the DNA magazines this year was probably to be found in Absolute Magnitude and Altair, with the other magazines trailing behind. Still, let us keep our fingers crossed that the DNA magazines are going to turn out to be a success story financially, because, frankly, the fiction semipro market could use one. (Information about all of the DNA Publications magazines can be found at http://www.sfsite.com/dnaweb/home.htm.)
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, one of the most reliably published of all the semiprozines, completed its twelfth year of publication, and, so far, has survived the death of founder and co-editor Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1999 (see below), with plans to continue the magazine for at least another year.
Terra Incognita, one of the newer semiprozines, and one that has maintained a high level of literary quality over the last couple of years (although a low level of reliability, as far as meeting their announced publishing schedule is concerned), managed to publish no issue at all in 1999, let alone the four they were supposed to have produced, although apparently an issue did eventually appear early in 2000, which we’ll consider for next year. Similarly, there was supposedly an issue of Tales of the Unanticipated published this year, but we didn’t see it in time to consider anything from it for this volume, and will have to hold it over for later. The curiously named LC-39 started this year, but although it’s a handsome production, looking more like a small-sized trade paperback than a magazine, most of the fiction in it struck me as rather weak; maybe it’ll get better as it goes along. Odyssey, an ambitious full-size, full-colour British magazine, died this year (perhaps because it never really could decide whether it was a science fiction magazine, a horror/fantasy magazine, or a media/gaming-oriented magazine, or perhaps merely because it was too expensive to produce), as did old-timer Crank! and mayfly-fast newcomer Age of Wonder last year. There were no issues of Non-Stop, Xizquil, Argonaut Science Fiction, Next Phase, Plot Magazine, or The Thirteenth Moon Magazine out this year, as far as I could tell, for the second year in a row, and I suspect some or most of them may be dead.
Of the surviving fiction semiprozines, Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, is an increasingly attractive little magazine, lively and interesting, and, although officially a horror semiprozine, is publishing a higher percentage of science fiction and fantasy as well these days. Indigenous Fiction: Wondrously Weird & Offbeat is still around, although it leans more in the direction its subtitle would indicate than toward more traditional SF or fantasy. The long-running Space & Time has reinvented itself as a full-size slick magazine with nice covers, and, probably as a result, is now getting national distribution on some newsstands. Although anything but slick, the eclectic little Irish semiprozine Albedo published some surprisingly good fiction this year by Brian Stableford, Esther M. Freisner, Colin Greenland, and others, including an evocative and fascinating novelette by Tais Teng. There are two Canadian fiction semiprozines, On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction and TransVersions. TransVersions, the newcomer, still seems the livelier of the two as far as the fiction is concerned, while the long-established On Spec, one of the longest running of all the fiction semiprozines, has seemed a bit tired in recent years; On Spec is the more reliably published of the two, though (one of the most reliable in the entire semiprozine market, in fact). Australia brings us three top-notch fiction semiprozines, one new one, Altair: Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction (no, don’t ask me what the subtitle means), and the two others, Aurealis, Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction and Eidolon, The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, among the longest established of all fiction semiprozines (along with On Spec). Although most of these magazine have (and traditionally have had) difficulty sticking to their publication schedules (Aurealis and Eidolon are ostensibly quarterly magazines, but Aurealis published just two issues in 1999, and Eidolon managed only one; Altair, a biannual, published both of its scheduled issues) they also published, as usual, some of the best fiction in the semi-professional market, with good work by Sean Williams, Paul Blake, and others in Altair, by Chris Lawson, Simon Ng, Andrew Morris, and others in Eidolon, and by Kyla Ward, John Ezzy, Robert Cox, and others in Aurealis. The dominant British fiction semiprozine is certainly The Third Alternative, a slick and handsome full-size magazine that features the work of top authors, but which features “slipstream”, literary surrealism, and horror rather than anything that most genre fans are going to recognize as SF or fantasy. Much the same could be said of the long-established Back Brain Recluse (most British semiprozines seem to lean in this direction, in fact), although I haven’t seen an issue of that for a while.
A promising new SF-oriented fiction semiprozine, scheduled to begin publication early in 2000, is the British Spectrum SF, which already has an impressive lineup of first-rate professional writers, including Alastair Reynolds, Keith Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, and Garry Kilworth, set for its first two issues. Let’s hope it turns out to be as good as it sounds; if it does, it could quickly become a key player in this market.
I don’t follow the horror semiprozine market much any more, but there the most prominent magazine seems to be the highly respected Cemetery Dance, with perhaps Talebones as a follow-up.
Turning to the critical magazines, Charles N. Brown’s Locus and Andy Porter’s SF Chronicle, as always, remain your best bet among that subclass of semiprozines known as newszines, and are your best resource if you’re looking for publishing news and/or an overview of what’s happening in the genre; SF Chronicle is still missing issues, although
they’re doing better than last year, but, almost alone in the whole semiprozine category, fiction or critical, Locus comes out on time month after month, like clockwork, as it has been doing for more than thirty years. The only other magazine in the market that comes even close to this remarkable record is The New York Review of Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell, which completed its eleventh full year of publication in 1999, once again bringing out its scheduled twelves issues of reviews, critical articles, esoteric miscellany, and sometimes fiercely contentious opinion. Another critical magazine that seems to be pretty reliably published is Speculations, a useful magazine that featured writing-advice articles as well as extensive sections of market reports and market news, had a pretty good publishing-reliability record as well, but early in 2000 announced that it was abandoning its print edition and would henceforth be available only in electronic form, at its Web site, http://www.speculations.com. Most of the other criticalzines come out so erratically that you could fairly say that they don’t really have schedules. There was an issue of Lawrence Person’s Nova Express out this year, but Steve Brown’s SF Eye has suspended publication. I’m pretty sure that the print version of David A. Truesdale’s Tangent is dead at this point – at least, I can’t honestly recommend that you spend your money subscribing to it, since I have my doubts that it will ever appear again – and even the fate of the on-line version, Tangent Online, is up in the air, although I have a little more faith that Truesdale will be able to get that one rolling again; let’s hope so, since in its heyday Tangent was performing an invaluable service for the field, one that’s not really being supplied by any other publication, with the sole exception of Mark Kelly’s columns in the print and on-line versions of Locus.
(Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, Locus Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $56 for a one-year first-class subscription, $46 for a second-class subscription, twelve issues; Science Fiction Chronicle, Algol Press, P.O. Box 022730, Brooklyn, NY 11202-0056, $20 for a one-year subscription, $25 for a one-year first-class subscription, twelve issues; The New York Review of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570, $32 per year, twelve issues; Nova Express, P.O. Box 27231, Austin, TX 78755-2231, $12 for a one-year (four-issue) subscription; Speculations, 111 West El Camino Real, Suite 109-400, Sunnyvale, CA 94087-1057, a first-class subscription, six issues, $25; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, P.O. Box 249, Berkeley, CA 94701, $16 for four issues in U.S.; On Spec, More Than Just Science Fiction, P.O. Box 4727, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6E 5G6, $18 for a one-year subscription; Aurealis, the Australian Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Chimaera Publications, P.O. Box 2164, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149, Australia, $43 for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, “all cheques and money orders must be made out to Chimaera Publications in Australian dollars”; Eidolon, the Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eidolon Publications, P.O. Box 225, North Perth, Western Australia 6906, $45 (Australian) for a four-issue overseas airmail subscription, payable to Eidolon Publications; Altair, Alternate Airings in Speculative Fiction, P.O. Box 475, Blackwood, South Australia, 5051, Australia, $36 for a four-issue subscription; Albedo, Albedo One Productions, 2 Post Road, Lusk Co., Dublin, Ireland; $30 for a four-issue airmail subscription, make cheques payable to Albedo One; Pirate Writings, Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, The Magazine of Science Fiction Adventures, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Dreams of Decadence – all available from DNA Publications, P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24142-2988, all available for $16 for a one-year subscription, all cheques payable to D.N.A. Publications; Century, Century Publishing, P.O. Box 150510, Brooklyn, NY 11215-0510, $20 for a four-issue subscription; Spectrum SF, Spectrum Publishing, P.O. Box 10308, Aberdeen, AB11 6ZR, United Kingdom, 17 pounds sterling for a four-issue subscription, make cheques payable to Spectrum Publishing; TransVersions, Paper Orchid Press, P.O. Box 52531, 1801 Lakeshore Road West, Mississauga, Ontario L5J 4S6, four-issue subscription, $20 U.S. or $24 Can., plus postage; Terra Incognita, Terra Incognita, 52 Windermere Avenue, 3, Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812, $15 for four issues; Tales of the Unanticipated, Box 8036, Lake Street Station, Minneapolis, MN 55408, $15 for a four-issue subscription; Space and Time, 138 W. 70th Street, 4B, New York, NY. 10023-4468, $10 for a two-issue subscription (one year), $20 for a four-issue subscription (two years); Artemis Magazine: Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Society, LRC Publications, 1380 E. 17th St., Suite 201, Brooklyn, NY 11230-6011, $15 for a four-issue subscription, cheques payable to LRC Publications; Talebones, Fiction on the Dark Edge, Fairwood Press, 10531 S.E. 250th Pl., 104, Kent, WA 98031, $16 for four issues; Indigenous Fiction, Wondrously Weird & Offbeat, I.F. Publishing, P.O. Box 2078, Redmond, WA 98073-2078, $15 for a one-year (three-issue) subscription; LC-39, Launch Publications, P.O. Box 9307, Baltimore, MD 21227, $12 for a one-year subscription, cheques payable to Launch Publications; The Third Alternative, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs. CB6 2LB, England, United Kingdom, $22 for a four-issue subscription, cheques made payable to TTA Press; Back Brain Recluse, P.O. Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, United Kingdom, $18 for four issues; Cemetery Dance, CD Publications, Box 18433, Baltimore, MD 21237. Many of these magazines can also be ordered on-line, at their Web sites; see the on-line section, above, for URLs.)
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