There have been surprises, failures and false starts, but the effort has paid off, and the genre now boasts a number of first-rate fiction magazines—Strange Horizons and HelixSF come immediately to mind—webzines that routinely publish groundbreaking stories and poetry by the best-known authors in the field.

Clarkesworld is another worthy contender in this ongoing experiment in Internet publishing. Each month, this site releases two new works of SF or fantasy; at year's end, these stories will be collected in a trade paperback anthology called Realms. The stories are virtually all there is to any given month's issue of Clarkesworld: There are no editorials, no poetry and no reviews on this site. There is, however, artwork—a cover for each issue—and some of these images are frankly gorgeous. That aside, this is very much a site for science fiction readers, one that doesn't disappoint. Writers featured in recent issues include Jeff Vandermeer, Cat Rambo, Elizabeth Bear and Jay Lake.

Like many webzines, Clarkesworld archives its stories, so the pool of available reading material gets deeper every month—and like many webzines it runs on a by-donation basis. It is definitely to be hoped that readers who value being able to quickly find a good SF story or two on the Web, at any time of day or night, will throw some support behind this promising young magazine.