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!
