Transformation Story Archive

» see transform.to as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

What killed this archive was a campaign in the Austrian parliament. That is not a sentence anybody would predict from a website full of amateur stories about people turning into wolves, and it is what happened.

Thomas Hassan, a web designer in Austria, had it running by May 1995, which is the basis for its claim to be the earliest archive on the internet for fiction of this kind. The premise was narrow on purpose: stories about a person physically becoming something else, or about what happens to them afterwards. Everything else about it was ordinary mid-nineties web, flat HTML with a webring badge at the bottom of every page. It sat at transform.to, a Tongan domain hack chosen years before domain hacks were a thing people did on purpose.

By 1997 it had enough standing that eSCENE, an annual anthology of writing first published in ezines, took nominations from it and considered seventeen of its stories, more than from any other single source that year. The archive was never structured as an ezine and kept ending up on lists of them anyway, because there was no other category for a website that published this much amateur fiction and paid nobody.

The archive was three years old before i had a modem, and it belonged to an English-language subculture with no Turkish edge on it whatsoever. I am reading this one from the outside, off a German mirror that is still serving the frozen pages twenty-three years after the last one was written.

~ the record ~

~ the shared universes ~

The rule that shaped the place was a prohibition. Ordinary fan fiction was not allowed, so writers who wanted a world to work in could not borrow one, and the community built its own instead. Somebody would invent a setting and publish it on the archive, and then leave it open for anyone else to write in.

Tales from the Blind Pig is the one that got out of hand in the best way, running to hundreds of stories from dozens of authors over the archive's life, with a continuity that outlasted most of the individual writers' interest in it. This is the same thing SCP and the collaborative wiki fictions would do a decade later with better tooling. Here it was done with plain files and an editor reading his mail.

~ the accusation ~

The hosting was the vulnerability. The archive ran on a non-profit server in Vienna belonging to public netbase/t0, a media-arts organization funded in part with public money, and by the late nineties the TSA was pulling a large enough share of netbase's traffic to be visible on the bill.

Then Austrian politics turned. Jörg Haider's Freedom Party picked what it called degenerate art as a target worth the effort, and by July 1998 that had turned into a public accusation that public netbase/t0 was accepting and facilitating child pornography. The party initially tied netbase to a separate hosting operation in the British Virgin Islands. That link was refuted, and the accusations continued anyway, with the archive's sexual content and its age-alteration stories now sitting inside the charge without ever being named in it.

Nothing was proved against anybody and nothing needed to be. Netbase lost its public funding and its free access, which meant the archive lost its server. It relocated to an American host in a scramble held together by volunteer mirrors. Hassan left the project during the move and went on to Public Voice Lab, eventually taking a seat on their board. The archive that arrived in America was the same files and not the same thing.

~ the last update ~

The front page has not changed since 2003 and it is worth reading, because it is funnier than it has any right to be and it is also the death certificate. It is written in character by somebody signing as Dr. Perry Noya, editor of a paper called the Weakly Gazelle, reporting that he went to congratulate the archive's editor, J.T. Skunk, and found the house ransacked, with large webbed pawprints in the mud outside it. The stories are locked inside JT's editing system and the email cannot be read without him. Readers are asked to contact the authorities if they see him, and to keep sending stories in regardless.

Under it the page says to check what is new as of July 15th, 2003. That page still loads. It lists what Dr. Noya calls the few stories JT left behind before he disappeared, ending with Arms and Armor by Jon Sleeper, added 2003-07-15. Nothing was ever added after it. A running gag about a missing editor became, without anybody deciding it, the last thing the archive ever said.

The rest went on for a long time without it. The TSA-Talk mailing list kept running under separate administration and still took new stories. A successor project opened at Shifti.org on 18 July 2007, built on MediaWiki by people off that list. The original archive stayed readable at transform.to for twenty-three more years, right up until this year, when the domain's nameservers stopped answering. The German mirror is still up. It still has the pawprints on it.

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