Le Cafard cosmique

» see cafardcosmique.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A cockroach in space is a strange name for a literary review and it fit. Le Cafard cosmique covered what the French call the littératures de l'imaginaire, the umbrella term that puts science fiction next to everything adjacent to it, and it did so with long book reviews and thematic dossiers that nobody was paid to write. The journalist Thierry Hornet started it in 1999. Wayback's oldest capture of it, from August 2000, is under two kilobytes of html.

From 2003 the site handed out its own annual prize, voted by its readers. Iain M. Banks took the first one for Le Sens du vent and Greg Egan took the last one, in 2010, for Océanique. In between came Gene Wolfe and, in 2008, Jean-Philippe Jaworski for Janua Vera. That last one is a French novel taking a prize voted by French readers on a site run out of somebody's spare evenings, a loop no commercial portal of the period was ever going to close.

The ending started in the forum. About a week before anything was public, the administrator posted that the site was no longer financially viable, and on 26 February 2011 the closure went out properly. The word used was hibernation, and the date it would end was listed as to be determined. SciFi-Universe covered it that afternoon under the headline Clap de fin, with a question mark, and listed the reasons as visits that never took off and a forum that had gone quiet.

~ the record ~

~ twelve years of unpaid reviews ~

The stated reason was financial and the diagnosis printed alongside it was traffic that never grew. Both of those describe the same shortage, because a site like this runs on no salaries. What it actually needs is somebody willing to file a thousand words on an M. John Harrison novel on a Tuesday evening for no reason beyond wanting it read. By early 2011 that supply had run out.

The SciFi-Universe writer put it as a question on the day: why are there no contributors left to post reviews or put a dossier together as volunteers, are there no disinterested enthusiasts any more. They also mentioned, in the same paragraph, having got their own start posting reviews in the Cafard forum, and named another critic who had come the same way.

It closed into a bad year for the form. The January 2011 issue of Bifrost, the French genre magazine, had just run a state-of-the-field package on science fiction and its prospects. SciFi-Universe put the two things in the same sentence, which is how a reader-run review site folding the following month got read at the time.

~ the hosting ran out in 2017 ~

Hibernation turned out to mean something literal. The archive stayed where it was and the forum stayed open. Pages kept answering for nearly seven more years after the last review was filed. Captures hold steady at five kilobytes right through to 3 November 2017, and from 12 December that year the address only redirects.

Point a browser at cafardcosmique.com today and it sends you to an American small press, landing on the page for one fantasy novel. The prize list survived in better shape than the site did: BDFI still carries all eight years of winners, which is more than most French webzines of that generation left behind.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »