Catahya

» see catahya.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Catahya was built around reading and writing fiction in Swedish, which puts a wall in front of it that no amount of bandwidth would have got me over. I am saying that first because it is the whole of my relationship to this one, and because it is also the thing that made the site work. A community organized around a language is small by definition and dense for the same reason.

The website started in 2002 with a focus on fantasy and on books specifically. The association came the following year, affiliated with Sverok, the Swedish federation for role-playing and conflict games, and registered in Stockholm. Over time the scope widened to take in horror and science fiction, and the site covered music and live-action roleplaying alongside the books, but the center of gravity stayed on the printed page.

Through the middle of the 2000s it was simply the largest place on the Swedish internet where people who cared about fantasy could find each other. Published Swedish fantasy authors posted there. People who were not published yet posted there too, and a reasonable number of them turned into the writers and editors the Swedish genre scene ran on a decade later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it put on paper ~

Most forums produce nothing you can hold. Catahya produced five anthologies of novellas: Drömskärvor in 2004, Vinter & hav in 2007, Tecken i aska och eld in 2008, Vansinnesverk in 2011, and Efter slutet in 2017. It put out two records, Chain of Command and Timewave Zero. It also ran the Catahyapriset, an annual award for the best Swedish-language fantasy novella published the year before, which meant the site was not just a place to post but a body that handed out a judgment.

That is an unusual amount of institutional behavior for a message board, and it is the part of Catahya with a paper trail outside the Wayback Machine.

~ sixteen years ~

The forum era in Sweden ran out somewhere around 2010, the same way it ran out everywhere else, with the conversation moving onto Facebook groups and later onto Discord. Catahya kept going for another eight years after its peak, which by internet standards is a very long twilight. The 2017 anthology is the last public thing it produced. The association dissolved the following year.

~ the parking page ~

catahya.net resolves. It serves a NameBright placeholder, the generic kind that a registrar puts up when a domain has been picked up by someone who has no particular plan for it. The old banner art is still in the Wayback Machine: a green strip with a bird perched over the wordmark, and the tagline mer än bara fantasy, more than just fantasy. That turned out to be accurate about the association and not about the website.

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