nostalgia
As I burned in deadline hell while struggling to put this installment together, it occurred to me that I had been writing “On the Net” for quite some time now. How long? When I pulled up my bibliography, my jaw dropped. We began our magical mystery tour of cyberspace ten years ago to the day. A decade.
Time freaking flies!
I just reread my initial column, entitled “Start,” for the first time since it was published in June of 1998 and was struck by a couple of things. I spent a lot of space laboring to make the rhetorical point that the net was very much like science fiction—since it hadn’t really happened yet. I whined that the hardware was excruciatingly slow and unreliable, the software was buggy and that most of the sites were “Under Construction.” Remember those goofy yellow animated gifs of guys with shovels <mikesfreegifs.com/main4/page_9.html>? They were everywhere back then! Here’s how I ended my argument:
I bring this up not to complain (well, sort of to complain), but to make the point that whatever it is that we’ve got now, it isn’t the net. Not yet. What we’ve got is the first paragraph of the first draft of a projected decology.
I’d say today that we’re at least up to page 107 of Volume II. Is there any question that the net is on its way to being the most important communications medium on the planet?
The other thing about that initial effort that jumps off the screen at me is that I was very much finding my way as a columnist, never having done anything of the sort before. What exactly was I supposed to be typing? All Sheila and Gardner had said was that I should write about the web with a genre slant. At first I took that to mean that I should come up with interesting websites that you could click. Those earliest installments were just that: nothing more than a random walk through my favorites list. The truth is that back then I doubted I could squeeze out more than a dozen or so columns before I’d use up all the good sites. But as I got the hang of columnizing, my focus changed. I didn’t want to write about which sites were interesting so much as I wanted to discuss why were they interesting. IMHO <acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/IMHO>, that is. And thus a monster pundit was created. I sometimes cringe as I’m writing these columns and notice that I’ve nattered on for hundreds of my allotted seventeen hundred words and haven’t yet given a URL.
Which is why I will now stop waxing nostalgic and, well, start waxing nostalgic in a different way. In a column I wrote five years ago called “Gallimaufry”—I just love that word, look it up!—I explained that one of the problems with writing themed columns was that I kept discovering terrific sites that didn’t quite fit into an essay. And so, in the spirit of the dawn of “On the Net,” here’s a selection of some of my current faves that have no relation whatsoever to one another.
good clicks
Science fiction lost one of its most lively websites in 2006 when the Hugo Award winning fanzine Emerald City <emcit.com> posted its final issue. But now the folks who brought you Emcit, Cheryl Morgan <cheryl-morgan.com> and Kevin Standlee <kevin-standlee.livejournal.com> are back with The Science Fiction Awards Watch <sfawardswatch.com>. As they write, “The science fiction and fantasy industry has lots of awards. We watch them, we report on them, we talk about them. Simple.” When I first heard about SFAW I wondered how Cheryl and Kevin could sustain interest in a site that is aimed at a niche in the genre. But their concept for the site has been proved, at least to my satisfaction. They list sixty-two separate awards programs that touch on our genre, and it seems as if there is usually news and/or controversy swirling around all of them. One intriguing feature of SFAW is the book discussion forum, where from time to time the editors assemble a distinguished panel of writers and editors to kick the tires of potential award contenders. What makes this different from the standard review is that the critics on the panel are in dialogue—and sometimes in disagreement—with one another. A new addition to the site is the SF Editors wiki. Now that there are Hugo Awards for Best Editor (Long Form) and (Short Form), informed voters will need to keep track of which editor bought what book or story. This data is not easy to come by except to industry insiders, and the wiki is intended to make it available to everyone.
While we’re on the subject of awards, the Hugos <thehugoawards.org> have a spiffy new home where you can look up past winners, explore the intricacies of the preferential voting method, read about the history of the award, and, in case you haven’t poked a stick in a hornet’s nest recently, discover how to propose changes to the rules.
As I write this, the short fiction review website Tangent Online <tangentonline.com> has been on sabbatical for almost four months. Luckily for fans of the short form, a new site, The Fix <thefix-online.com>, has arrived on the scene. Andy Cox, of TTA Press <ttapress.com>, publisher of Interzone and Black Static, and Eugie Foster <eugiefoster.com> have created a site that is visually pleasing and intellectually stimulating. The size of their staff of columnists and reviewers is impressive. I counted over fifty; most are themselves working or aspiring writers. Of course, the skill and style of the reviewers vary; for the most part they give plot summaries and in some cases offer a critical, or at least a personal, reaction to the story. The intent would seem not so much to pass judgment as to describe stories that a reader might want to look for. The columns are quite astute—I can particularly recommend James Van Pelt’s <sff.net/people/james.van.pelt> The Day Job and Scott Danielson’s <scottddanielson.blogspot.com> Audiobook Fix. The Fix is one of the most promising new sites of 2007.
The Atlas of the Universe <atlasoftheuniverse.com> will make you feel insignificant—in a good way. Although the idea of this site, created by astrophysicist Richard Powell, is simple, the execution is elegant. It features a series of nine star maps, beginning with one that shows our nearest neighbors in space, the thirty-three stars that are within 12.5 light years of our solar system. The next map shows stars that are 250 light years from our sun, the one after that shows those that are five thousand light years away, and the one after that shows the entirety of the Milky Way, a loose spiral disc of two hundred billion stars, the farthest of which is fifty thousand light years distant from us. And that’s just the beginning of the journey this wonderful site will take you on. By the time you open the last map, you are looking at the entire visible universe, thirty billion trillion stars that span fourteen billion light years. One insight that this science fiction writer takes away from the atlas is that, although faster than light travel seems more fantasy than science fiction, if we ever should build a starship it is inconceivable that we won’t bump into other life forms.
This summer my wife and I decided to cut back our cable TV to the basic minimum of twenty channels (gasp!) and rely on our Netflix <netflix.com> account for most of our media consumption. So far, no regrets. But I’d be hard pressed to decide what to add to my queue if I didn’t have Rotten Tomatoes <rottentomatoes.com> as a guide. This is a compendium of movie reviews—ranging from big print media like the New York Times and the Boston Globe to the savvy members of the Online Film Critics Society. Of course, many of you have already clicked RT—5.2 million readers do every month—but in case you haven’t, join the crowd! What I like best about this site is that they give grades based on the critical consensus. By the time you read this, most of the movies that are now in theaters will be out on DVD—for example, I Am Legend, which got just a 64 percent and Beowulf, which got a 70 percent. (I saw Beowulf in a 3D theater and would give it another 6 or 7 percent for some very special effects.) Check out some of our SF classics that are rated on the site: The Day the Earth Stood Still earns a 93 percent, while Forbidden Planet gets a well-deserved 94 percent. And my all-time guilty pleasure, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, gets an 89 percent. Take that, Will Smith!
SFScope <sfscope.com> is SF’s newest news site. Edited by Ian Randal Strock, SFScope wants to be your source for news about science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It’s a little like Locus Online <locusmag.com>, only more wide-ranging and a little like SciFi Wire <scifi.com/scifiwire>, only stronger on news of the print world and not so media-centric. The reporting is succinct, the interface is clean and easy to navigate. SFScope has become one of my daily must-clicks.
The daily online comics anthology Act-I-Vate <community.livejournal.com/act_i_vate> is currently my favorite online graphic novel source. This is a collaborative of twenty-three talented artists who are making their bleeding edge work available to the world for free. Many of them have more mainstream projects going, but feel the need to push boundaries. As Dan Goldman said in an interview, “I look at Act-I-Vate as a kind of a laboratory. I’m doing stuff that I don’t know if anyone would publish—just yet anyway.” I can particularly recommend Goldman’s Kelly (no relation, that’s for sure), Dean Haspiel’s Immortal, and Mike Caravallo’s Parade, although there is something for everyone at this immense site. Warning: Don’t even think of sampling the fare here if you have anything important to do in the next eight hours.
exit
There you have it: a potpourri, a mishmashed medley, a gallimaufry, if you will, of sites to celebrate our decade of clicking URLs together. Let’s plan to do this for another ten years, shall we? Who knows what volume of the decology we’ll be up to by then.
