SF Signal

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

~ the last words ~

My English-language reading in the SF Signal years was hardware forums and driver notes. I was on donanimhaber and frmtr in Turkish, building signature blocks with my component list in them, and whatever English I read online was in service of getting something to work. Anglophone science fiction fandom had a whole publishing culture running in parallel to that, with its own awards and its own arguments, and I walked past it for thirteen years without looking in.

John DeNardo and JP Frantz started SF Signal in 2003 for a reason that sounds impossible now: there was no good blog covering science fiction, so they made one. What it became was a daily aggregation and review desk for the genre, run by volunteers, covering the books and the awards season that fandom takes seriously.

The feature that carried its name was Mind Meld. One question would go out to a dozen authors and editors, and the answers came back in a single long post, which meant a working roundtable of the field appeared on a hobbyist blog every week for years. By 2010 there was a podcast as well, and it ran to 322 episodes under Patrick Hester before the end.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The awards are the part that measures it from outside. SF Signal won the Hugo for Best Fanzine in 2012, the first year it was eligible in that category, and it was the first electronic fanzine of its kind to take it. It won again in 2013. The podcast took Best Fancast in 2014, and there was one more nomination sitting on the table in 2016 when the site closed.

Fanzine is a word that carries a mimeograph in it, and a Hugo-winning fanzine in 2012 was a WordPress install with a comment section. That transfer of a 1950s fan-publishing category onto a blog is most of what SF Signal proved. The institution was the practice, not the paper.

~ the day it died ~

On 5 May 2016 a post went up called "All Good Things..." and the reason given was the least dramatic one available. The blog had grown, and so had what it demanded from the people running it. There was no acquisition and no advertising collapse behind it.

What is unusual is the refusal to taper. DeNardo said a reduced SF Signal would only be a shadow of the one they had, so they took it out at the top instead of letting it decay in public over five years, which is the far more common ending for a volunteer site.

~ the long tail ~

The archive was the thing people worried about immediately, because thirteen years of genre coverage lives nowhere else. There was talk of finding it a permanent home. Today sfsignal.com does not answer at all, so what survives is whatever the Internet Archive caught and whatever the outbound links from other blogs still point at.

The category it occupied is gone too, in the sense that nobody now starts a group blog to cover a field. That work moved onto newsletters and onto platforms owned by somebody else, where the archive question gets decided by a company rather than by two people who ran out of evenings.

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