"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 15th Annual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

venerable by on-line standards, is a good place to start, a lively general-interest site, with SF-related
news, reviews of other SF sites of interest, and lots of media, gaming, and book reviews (including an
occasional column by John Clute), as well as links to many genrerelated sites. Also valuable as a
home-away-from-home for genre readers is SFF NET (http//w.sff.net), which features dozens of home
pages for SF writers, genre-oriented we chats," and, among other lists of data, the Locus Magazine
Index 1984-1996, which is an extremely valuable research tool; you can also link to the Science Fiction
Writers of America page from here, where valuable research data and reading lists are to be found as
well, or you can link directly to the SFFWA Web page at http://www.sfwa.org/sfw.
There are some new contenders in this area this year as well. The newszine Locus now has an on-line
version up and running, Locus Online (http://www.locusmag.com), and it's quickly become one of my
most frequent stops on the Internet, in part because of the rapidity with which breaking news gets posted
there, and for the other reviews and features, but mostly to browse Mark Kelly's comments about recent
short fiction, which are similar to the contents of his column in the print Locus, but with some additional
perspectives not available in the print edition. Another ambitious new site, which has quickly become one
of my favorite destinations while Web-surfing, is SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which, in addition to hosting
the Asimov's and Analog sites, and having lots of links to other genre-related sites of interest, also
features extensive review sections, and is perhaps more oriented toward print literature (as opposed to
media and gaming stuff) than is Science Fiction Weekly. SF Site has also just started carrying a
short-fiction review column by Dave Truesdale of the print semiprozine Tangent, which is one of the few
places on-line other than Locus Online where you can find genre short fiction being reviewed on a
regularly scheduled basis. And for a refreshingly iconoclastic and often funny slant on genre-oriented
news, from multiple Hugo-winner David Langford, check out the on-line version of his fanzine Ansible
(http://www.des.gla.ac.uk/ansible/). Many of the criticalzines also have Web sites, including The New
York Review of Science Fiction (http://eebs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html), Nova Express
(http://www.delphi.convsflit/novaexpress/index.html), Speculations (http://www.speculations.com/), SF
Eye (http://www.empathy.com/eyeball/sfeye.html), and Tangent (http://www.sff.net/tangent/), but most of
these sites are fairly inactive.
Many Bulletin Board Services, such as GENIE, Delphi (which also now has a Web site,
http://www.delphi.com/sflit/), Compuserve, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and
fans, with GENIE having perhaps the largest and most active such community. Most of these services
also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time "chats" or conferences, as does SFF NETTHE
SF-oriented chat on Delphi, the one with which I'm most familiar, and which gives you the opportunity to
schmooze with well-known professional SF writers in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. It starts every
Wednesday at about 10:00 P.m. EST.
It was a bad year in the semiprozine market, particularly in the fiction semiprozines, although even as
old titles falter, new titles appear on the horizon to replace them-or try to anyway. Some of the proposed
new titles look promising, but the odds are greatly against any new magazine succeeding in the current
market and under the current distribution system, I fear, particularly an undercapitalized magazine, and
that description fits most semiprozines. Those long odds don't seem to discourage people enough to stop
them from trying though.
There was no issue of Century published in 1997, just as they didn't publish their last three scheduled
issues in 1996; and although the editor was claiming as recently as a couple of weeks ago that Century
would eventually rise again from the ashes, he was assuring me of exactly the same thing at the end of
1996, so at this point I'm skeptical. Century was the most promising fiction semiprozine launch of the
'90s, but for the moment, I'm afraid that I have to consider it dead; they'll have to Show Me that I'm
wrong by actually publishing an issue before I change my mind, and even then I'd think they'd have to
show they can publish on something approaching a regular schedule before they'd entirely regain the trust
of their subscribers. I'm going to continue to list their subscription address here, in case you want to take
a chance on them, but at this point in time I can't in good faith recommend that you subscribe, since
there's at least a decent chance you'll never see anything in return for the money. There was also no issue