The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

People go online, though, for other reasons other than just finding stories to read. In fact, there’s a large cluster of general interest sites that don’t publish fiction but do publish lots of reviews, critical articles, and genre-oriented news of various kinds, which can be great fun to drop in on. Among my most frequent stops while Web-surfing are: Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), the online version of the newsmagazine Locus, which won a Hugo Award year as “Best Web Site,” one of the most valuable sites on the whole Internet for the SF buff-a great source for fast-breaking genre-related news, as well as access to book reviews, critical lists, and extensive and invaluable data-base archives such as the Locus Index to Science Fiction and the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards; Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw/), a similar site, more media-and-gaming oriented than Locus Online, but that also features news and book reviews, as well as regular columns by John Clute, Michael Cassut, and Wil McCarthy; Tangent Online (www.sfsite.com/tangent/), perhaps the most valuable SF-oriented review site on the Internet, especially for short fiction; Best SF (www.bestsf.netf), another great review site, and one of the few places, along with Tangent Online, that makes any attempt to regularly review online fiction as well as print fiction; Bluejack (www.bluejack.com), less exhaustively comprehensive than Tangent On line or Best SF, but still a place to find insightful magazine reviews, as well as bluejack’s own online diary; SFRevu (www.sfrevu.com), another review site, although rather than reviewing short fiction, they specialize in media and novel reviews; the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com), which provides a home for Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction and for Science Fiction Weekly, and to the bimonthly SF-oriented chats hosted by Asimov’s and Analog, as well as vast amounts of material about SF movies and TV shows; the SF Site (www.sfsite.com), which not only features an extensive selection of reviews of books, games, and magazines, interviews, critical retrospective articles, letters, and so forth, plus a huge archive of past reviews; but also serves as host-site for the web-pages of The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Interzone, and the above-mentioned SFRevu; SFF net (www.sff.net), a huge site featuring dozens of home pages and “newsgroups” for SF writers, plus sites for genre-oriented “live chats”; the Science Fiction Writers of America page (www.sfwa.org); where news, obituaries, award information, and recommended reading lists can be accessed; Audible (www.audible.com) and Beyond 2000 (www.beyond2000.com), where SF-oriented radio plays can be accessed; multiple Hugo-winner David Langford’s online version of his fanzine Ansible (www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/), which provides a funny and often iconoclastic slant on genre-oriented news; and Speculations (www.speculations.com), a long-running site which dispenses writing advice, although to access most of it, you’ll have to subscribe to the site.

Live online interviews with prominent genre writers are also offered on a regular basis on many sites, including interviews sponsored by Asimov’s and Analog and conducted by Gardner Dozois on the Sci-Fi Channel (www.scifi.com/chat) every other Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST (Sci Fiction chats conducted by Ellen Datlow are also featured on the Sci-Fi Channel at irregular intervals, usually on Thursdays, check the site for details); regular scheduled interviews on the Cybling site (www.cybling.com); and occasional interviews on the Talk City site (www.talkcity.com). Many Bulletin Board Services, such as Delphi, CompuServe, and AOL, have large online communities of SF writers and fans, and some of these services also feature regularly scheduled live interactive real-time “chats” or conferences, in which anyone interested in SF is welcome to participate. The SF-oriented chat on Delphi, every Wednesday at about 10 p.m. EST, is the one with which I’m most familiar, but there are similar chats on F.net, and probably on other BBSs as well.