Watch the Skies - Tor.com goes live beta
This week’s big genre fiction news is undoubtedly the long-promised launch of the new-look Tor.com - a publisher’s website that is also a social network, free fiction repository, group-blog and webzine all in one. Go take a look around and see what you can find.
As Charlie Stross points out, it’s been a long time coming - not just for Tor but for big publishing houses in general, who have been slow to adapt to the post-print internet paradigm.
Of course, not everyone is all positive. Genre fiction’s gadfly-in-chief, Futurismic columnist Jonathan McCalmont, wonders if Tor.com is too little (or rather too much) too late:
“I put it to you that this community (which has been admirably quick in adapting to new technologies) is as connected as it can possibly get and that this connection is (aside from a few existing forums) nicely decentralised and organic.
In fact, I put it to you that [the genre fiction] community is getting dangerously close to the saturation point. As more and more bloggers jump the fence and start doing PR, it’s getting to the point where it is actually quite time consuming to wade through PR in order to find serious content.
[snip]
What we need is not more connection, it is more filtering and more paying venues for the serious content that many of us put out for free.
A white elephant hybrid of time sink and PR sludge-pump that pays hugely exposed writers such as Stross and Scalzi for content in the hope of sucking in our marketing eye-balls strikes me as precisely what online SF does not need, right now.”
What are your thoughts on the new Tor site? Pipe up in the comments!
July 21st, 2008 at 3:13 am
Gadfly in chief? that’s impressive! I must have missed the memo. I’m assuming there’s a sash and maybe a hat that goes with the post
July 21st, 2008 at 5:05 am
Saturation point? I struggle to find info about upcoming genre books to the point that I have to browse online bookstores to get an idea. If there’s an entire community out there talking and promoting this stuff it’s not doing a very good job if I haven’t managed to stumble across it. I’m never off the net
How about a post pulling together all the good places to go for genre news and reviews? I’d certainly find it helpful.
July 21st, 2008 at 5:15 am
Jonathan - er, we might be able to get you a plastic thing with your name on it? Or an old ‘Prefect’ badge with your new title tippexed on…
Flub - you surprise me, sir, but I guess it’s an easy mistake to make. There’s no one unifying news source… I watch about 300 RSS feeds daily to keep an ear to the ground, and I know the SF Signal gang do a similar number. Maybe I’ll follow your suggestion and make a list of the essential sites… or, better still, crowdsource it!
July 21st, 2008 at 5:34 am
To have a list of RSS feeds to watch you have to get the info from somewhere. I’m slowly accumulating a list of sites to read but you can’t guess them. You need to be told. Thanks for SF Signal though. I’ve just added that to GReader.
I’m often being surprised by release dates for books I should have known about well before hand. It’s annoying and the only media I have this problem in.