07/20/99

Locus Magazine

Several years ago, at the dawn of web publishing, I dreamed of doing a Locus Magazine type of site. Locus Magazine started about the time I first started publishing print zines, and I admired Charles N. Brown's little white paper zine, which if memory serves me right, was mimeographed, folded in thirds, and had a page limit to what could be mailed with a first class stamp. The latest issue #462 sits beside me, with a slick glossy cover. And in recent times, it's been a great website too. Locus Magazine has come a long way. It is subtitled "The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field," and it truly lives up to that ambition.

There is no way that Olivier and I could publish a website to compete with Locus. Mr. Brown has decades of experience, a staff of workers, and an army of correspondents. SciFan has two editors and one contributor from Australia, Christine Hawkins. Olivier and I decided immediately we couldn't be a SF news site.

SF Site

Next we looked at SF Site, a splendid website that reviews new books. When SciFan was first published I tried to read and review two books. The lesson taught me how easy it is to dream of doing something versus the actual reality of working at something. No, we couldn't compete with SF Site. We had to narrow our focus some more.

Between Locus Magazine and SF Site, any reader should be able to keep up with what's being newly published in the SF&F field. So, I and my never met, French coeditor, decided we should narrow our ambition to organizing older books into groups that readers might find revealing and worthwhile. Progress is slow. Olivier struggles to list book series and awards. I've been trying to develop themes and other coherent classes of books.

Violet Books

I just discovered the Violet Books website, subtitled "Antiquarian Supernatural, Fantasy & Mysterious Literatures" by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Proprietrice. Ms. Salmonson is writer of a number of books and anthologies, so please check her bibliography. She also runs a mail-order bookstore. Ms. Salmonson collects and sells a very specialized type of literature, which she also writes about, and I would guess influences her own works.

I am in total envy of her focus. Prowling around her site makes me want to take up reading a score of new writers. Violet Books works to maintain the memory of writers like H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, FitzJames O'Brien, and Jeffery Farnol. She also focuses on lost race stories, swashbuckler sea stories, and other adventure genres of last century and early twentieth.

What Jessica Amanda Salmonson has done is create a very useful, very focused, very coherent website built around something she loves. I admire that. That is what Olivier and I should be doing. We're working at it. Our focus and coherence will come with time as we polish this site.

So on this 30th anniversary of the first moon landing, I wish I was watching the first manned landing on Mars. Instead, I'm looking back a hundred years at books written with a fantastic spirit of adventure. SciFan wants to live both in the past and the future. I think we need that passion to explore, a passion lost to our modern world. If the Victorians had the technological know how of going to Mars like we have, would they have sacrificed and spent the money? The public loved H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. I can't help but think, yes, those generations from long past would have had the desire and fortitude to move faster into the future.