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

have to wade through all the crap themselves. This has been the function of the editor from the beginning
of the print fiction industry after all, and people buy print magazines for the very same reason: because of
the implicit promise that the editor has gone out into the wilderness of prose and hunted down and
bagged and brought back for them tasty morsels of fiction they'll enjoy consuming, and I don't see why
this wouldn't work for an on-line magazine as well. The question then becomes, has Budrys succeeded in
so convincing a large-enough portion of the potential alldience to actually keep him in business? The
jury's still out on that question so far. But if Tomorrow SF can succeed in getting readers in significant
numbers to pay to access the site, it could have a big effect on the shape of genre publishing on-line.
Another interesting experiment on which the jury's still out is taking place at Mind's Eye Fiction
(http://www.tale.com/genres.htm), where you can read the first half of stories for free, but if you want to
read the second half of the story, you have to pay for the privilege, which you can do by setting up an
electronic account on-line and then clicking a few buttons. The fees are small, less than fifty cents per
story in most cases, and although the wise money is sneering at this concept as well, I think that this setup
could actually work if they got some Bigger Name authors involved in the project. At the moment, most
of the writers you can access here are writers who don't have large reputations or avid followings (who
are willing to take a chance on a screwy concept like this because they have little to lose), and that may
make it harder for this experiment to succeed as fully as it otherwise might.
The quality of the fiction falls off quickly after these sites, although there are a few new contenders
this year. Most of these sites are still in their infancy, however, and not working entirely up to speed as
yet; most are also associated with existent print magazines. Eidolon: SF Online (http://w.midnight.com.all/
eidolorx/) offers information about back issues of Eidolon magazine and about Eidolon authors and about
the Australian professional scene in general, as well as reprint stories from previous issues, available to be
read on-line or downloaded. They are also promising to publish a good amount of original on-line-only
fiction in the future, though at the moment the only such story available is one by Sean Williams and
Simon Brown-and that one was good enough to make it into this anthology. Aurealis, the other Australian
semiprozine, also has a site (http://w.aurealis.hi.net) with similar kinds of features available, although so
far they've announced no plans for original fiction. I've already mentioned the Asimov's
(http://asimovs.conv) and Analog (http.//analogsf.conv) sites. Both sites are currently running teaser
excerpts from stories coming up in forthcoming issues, as well as book reviews, critical essays, and so
forth, and I plan to start running a certain amount of original on-line-only fiction on the Asimov's site as
soon as I can arrange to do so, as well as live interactive author interviews and chats. Another interesting
site is the British Infinity Plus (http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/), which features a large selection of
reprint stories, most by British authors, as well as extensive biographical and bibliographical information,
book reviews, critical essays, and so forth. They too promise to begin running a good deal of original
on-line-only fiction in the near future, and (as far as I can tell, anyway; it would be helpful, with this and
other sites, if they'd label more clearly what's a reprint and what isn't) already have some excerpts from
as yet unpublished novels. Terra Incognita (http://www.netaxs.com/-incognit), Century
(http://w.supranet.net/century/) and the two Canadian semiprozines On Spec (http://w.icomm.ca/onspec/)
and Transversions (http://w.astro.psu.edu/ users/harlow/transversions/) also have Web sites, although not
terribly active ones. Talebones (http://w.wenture.convtalebones) is another interesting site, although
oriented toward horror and dark fantasy rather than SF. Longer established sites that are worth keeping
an eye on, although the quality of the fiction can be uneven, include
Intertext(http://w.etext.org/Zines/Intertext/), and E-Scape (http://w.interink.coni/escape.litm]).
If none of these sites has satisfied you, you can find lots of other genre "electronic magazines" by
accessing littp.//w.yahoo.convarts/humanitiesaiterature/genres/science-fiction-fantasy-horror/magazines/,
but I hope you're extremely patient and have a strong stomach, since many of these sites are extremely
badin fact, there's more amateur-level, slush-pile quality fiction out there on the Internet than you could
wade through in a year of determined reading.
While you're on-line, don't forget to check out some of the genre-related sites that don't publish
fiction. Science Fiction Weekly (http://w.scifiweekly.com), which has been around long enough to be