SCI FICTION

» see scifi.com/scifiction as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

SCI FICTION ran from 2000 to 2005, which in my case covers the last of the dial-up years and the internet cafe stretch that followed. Text was the one thing that connection could carry without complaint, and I still never read a word of it. American genre fiction had its own subscription culture and its own award season, and neither of those came down a Turkish phone line.

The site opened on 19 May 2000 inside SciFi.com, the web arm of what was then the Sci-Fi Channel. Ellen Datlow ran it. She had spent the 1980s as fiction editor of Omni, so what happened here was that a cable network hired one of the most respected editors in the field and then let her buy whatever she wanted.

It paid professional rates at a time when almost everything published on the web paid nothing, and it put up something new every week. Next to the originals ran a classics section of reprints, which made the site a reading list as much as a magazine. All of it was free with no account and no registration wall.

The awards came in on schedule. Four stories first published there won Nebulas, and Linda Nagata's Goddesses was the first Nebula ever given to a story that appeared online. In 2005 the site itself took the Hugo for Best Website while Datlow took Best Editor for the second time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five months after the hugo ~

Five months after that Hugo, the Sci-Fi Channel closed it. The reasons given were that it did not generate much money and that it did not pull many visitors. A third reason was more revealing than either: keeping track of who held the rights to all those stories had become more administrative trouble than the network wanted to carry.

The last story went up on 28 December 2005. There was no farewell issue and no attempt to sell the thing to somebody who wanted it. A website section closed because a section of a website is what it had always been on the org chart, whatever it was to the people reading it.

~ the long tail ~

SCI FICTION settled an argument that mattered enormously at the time. Before it, publishing online was where a story went after the print magazines had passed on it. After it, a story could take the field's highest awards without ever touching paper.

The people who built the paying online magazines of the following decade were reading this one while it ran. Every venue that now pays a real rate for a short story and publishes it in a browser is standing on the case SCI FICTION made, and the case took five years and one cable network's patience to make.

~ the files came down ~

The archive stayed up for a while after the buying stopped, which is the part that dates the whole story. In June 2007 the removal of the files was announced. A website reorganization at a cable channel took down several hundred stories that writers had been paid professional rates to produce.

What was left afterward lived on the authors' own pages and in the Wayback Machine. An operation with a Hugo on the shelf could not hold a URL for eighteen months past its own closure, because nobody at the parent company had a reason to keep paying for the disk.

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