nternet years are a bit like dog years, only magnified 1,000 times. Dogs supposedly pass seven years for each human one—that's a cliche I'm sure you've heard before. But what I've noticed, and what you might not have realized, is that for each human year that passes, the Web experiences not seven years, but seven lifetimes. Interactive companies are announced with great fanfare, only to be given quiet funerals, as if the people behind them hope you won't notice that they've gone. New ways of doing business are ballyhooed as cutting-edge trends, which then become passe almost as soon as they are announced, and newer trends arise to up the ante. The lifetimes of most Web sites are brief, giving mayflies the appearance of Methuselah by comparison.
That's not to say that paper magazines do not also rise and fall. I know that fact all too well, from my eight-year experience with Science Fiction Age, a magazine which I'd hoped would next year be arriving at a 10-year anniversary, but which instead gave up the ghost last year. So it isn't as if Web sites hold the patent on obsolescence. But this endless cycle of birth and death somehow seems different here, where every new Internet magazine is announced not just as a new reading experience, but rather as a revolution that will inevitably change the state of reading itself. The hype is not so, of course. But since so many Internet magazines seem to be saying that they will make paper unnecessary, this means that when they pass from the Earth, the fall always seems so much farther.
The Internet graveyard, so newly dug, has already become a very crowded place. Sites I used to enjoy visiting regularly are now gone completely—or sometimes kept alive only as static museum relics, frozen in time as they were on their day of extinction, with no new material being offered. I'm not sure which of the two states I find sadder, though in the lemming-like rush of sites to be abandoned by the side of the road of the information superhighway, even that continued existence is welcome.
Sincere,
Shameless Self-Promotion
So forgive me for a moment if I take the time to toot our own horn. It's been six years now since Craig Engler founded Science Fiction Weekly, the independent voice of SF news, reviews and interviews. That first issue, bearing a date of August 15, 1995, contained screen reviews of The Net and Virtuosity, a book review of Nicola Griffith's Slow River, a game review of TSR's Dragon Dice, and more. The big items in the News department that week were the crackdown on the pirating of bootleg Babylon 5 tapes and the announcement of that year's Hallmark Star Trek Christmas ornament. Many of the same columnists from that first issue are here with us now. Kathie Huddleston, for instance, is hard at work at this very moment pulling together next month's Fall Preview articles.
That's not to say that there haven't been changes along the way. For example, we've added columns and departments, continually attempting to improve the product. And when The SCI FI Channel purchased Science Fiction Weekly a few years ago, Craig Engler took over the running of the entire SCIFI.com site, and Brooks Peck, who'd been a contributor since the beginning, assumed the role of editor-in-chief. One year ago, when Brooks decided to return to his writing roots, I was brought in to helm Science Fiction Weekly. Yet though some things have changed, the most important aspect remains true—our mission to survey the entire SF field and report back, pointing readers in the direction of what is good, and steering them away from what is not.
Many have collapsed into the SF graveyard, but Science Fiction Weekly is still standing, a fact worth noting as we celebrate our sixth anniversary. Thanks for being here to help blow out the virtual candles and chow down on the virtual cake.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
