Tag Archives: website

Watch the Skies – Tor.com goes live beta

Tor.com logo

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.

Find science fiction conventions by zip code

Conventions are the social backbone of the science fiction scene, and the old adage says that there’s always one taking place somewhere. Question is, how do you locate them?

John Joseph Adams suggested some fan with web-smarts should step into the breach and knock together a website for locating conventions by US zip code, and within less than a day Nathan Lilly (who is also the editor of SpaceWesterns.com, by the way) had done exactly that with Con Finder.

Who says fandom can’t get things done quickly, eh? Now, Nathan, if you could just upgrade it to global coverage – let’s say by Sunday night?