About SFcrowsnest

Uncle Geoff has a story to tell. The story of SFcrowsnest. So settle down, kids, pull yourself up a chair by the fire and warm your hands while the history of online SF unfolds before your eyes...

SFcrowsnest has a strange and spotty past, as befitting a SF/F site that now rather bewilderingly finds itself the most popular SF site in Europe (and the 3rd most popular in the world).

It started out as a printed magazine launched in the UK in 1991, called ProtoStellar, a glossy magazine which was founded by Shadwell Oman, a half-arab half-welsh fan of things SF/F. When Shadwell moved back to the United Arab Emirates in 1993, he sold the magazine to one of its contributors of cyberpunk fiction, Stephen Hunt.

Along with another then new on the scene author Stephen Baxter, the readers had voted Stephen Hunt a ProtoStellar Award for best new writer- so he figured it would be cruel to let such a 'discerning' magazine pass into history. In 1994 two odd twists of fate were to occur.

First, Stephen Hunt won the WH Smith New Talent award for his fantasy novel 'For the Crown and the Dragon'. This is a scheme - now sadly discontinued - where thousands of authors submitted manuscripts to the UK's largest book retailer every year, and WH Smith then published the best two titles directly.

Why sadly discontinued?

Well, Hunt had first read about the scheme in one of those Yearbooks for writers, and decided to try his luck. The scheme was intended to try to reverse what WH Smith saw as the growing failure of publishers to break new authors, with imprints preferring to put all their effort into the superstars like King, Pratchett, Eddings etc.

If anything, this situation is even worse today than in the early 90s. The big names in fiction gobble up whole walls of shelf-space, while new authors have been squeezed into a tinier and tinier niche ... somewhere to the left of Trek & Star Wars novels, and somewhere to the right of all those novels written by TV chefs, politicians, super-models, comedians and, well,anyone who isn't really an author.

The award certainly worked for Stephen Hunt. He sold 6000 copies through WH Smith alone (no other bookseller would stock 'product' so closely associated with a rival retailer, of course).

He was filmed for the BBC's BookWorm TV programme, had a hoot when RolePlayer Independent voted his novel 'Best Fantasy Novel of the Year', and got nice reviews in Locus, SF chronicle, The Guardian, Interzone and various other publications. The sub-genre which the novel 'For The Crown and the Dragon' created, 'Flintlock Fantasy', continues to thrive today.

It even has its own popular Role Playing Game and range of miniatures, called 'Flintloque'. Fans of the works of Stephen Hunt are today known by the newsgroup they run (alt.fan.shunt), 'shunters' - and apparently reading any fiction by our Stephen is called 'shunting'.

There, hopefully, the train spotting analogies for SF/F fans end! It was a nice 15 minutes of fame for Stephen, and the royalities from 'For The Crown and the Dragon' continue to help pay for this site today. The second twist of fate? Well, in 1994, a bizarre little thing called the Internet started to intrude on people's attentions.

Hunt had been involved in Apple's failed pre-Web attempts to create a rival to AOL, called AppleWorld - a proprietary online service/bulletin board you had to dial into. This was enough to qualify him to launch one of the first internet magazines, Nature.com

The site was a super success, and by the end of 1994, as the internet revolution grew from strength to strength, Hunt found himself in increasingly rarefied positions in leading publishing companies.

Now - with an increasingly serious career - and not enough time to devote to ProtoStellar in its print form, Hunt bit the bullet, took the magazine online, and renamed it Hologram Tales - a name intended to hark back to the wonder days of Astounding Tales, Amazing Tales and the like. In 1999, the web site was renamed again and got a new a new web address SFcrowsnest.com, selling it's original generic URL SF-fantasy.com to a Japanese firm.

SFcrowsnest also started to expand its most popular section - not, somewhat surprisingly, the fiction - but its search engine. This oddly drove traffic through the roof - and to the peak of popularity which it has reached today.

Anyway, the pressures of the somewhat unasked for title of dot com guru and web pioneer has meant that Stephen Hunt hasn't had the time he'd like to devote to either SFcrowsnest or his literary endeavors.

Thankfully, the slack has been gleefully taken up by the new Editor, - yours truly - Geoff Willmetts.

I started out as the most frequent contributor to the site, and enjoyed the experience so much that I was happy to help Steve out by shouldering some of the load.

Time poverty aside, Yahoo has ranked SFcrowsnest as among the best in the genre; we're one of only four web sites to make it into the Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; our ranks of users still swell every month; and the nice emails we get from thousands of kind fans helps keep our morale up.

A clarion call to all Shunters
by Stephen Hunt

I'm writing this in answer to the two emails I get the most from fans. Consider this my own personal FAQ, if you will.

First, 'Why can't I download your short stories any more from the Rocket Library?'

Nothing to do with me, I am afraid, people. Nuvomedia Rocketbook was the most popular eBook format, but since it was taken over by Gemstar, their new corporate masters have decided to trim the extras off their bottom line - one of those extras was the Rocket Library. I would point out the Rocket Library didn't benefit me financially, as the short stories were being downloaded free.

I must admit, though, it was quite flattering that 40% of all the library's downloads consisted of my short fiction. Seeing my name ranked above that of Shakespeare, Dickens and Sun Tzu for downloads counts as one of the more surreal experiences of my life. If I find anything of equivalent standard, I'll be sure to repost all those short stories. I can't load them all on SFcrowsnest, because the extra bandwidth costs would just about bankrupt me.

Why the heck do you think Nuvomedia shut down the Rocket Library? My free downloads were hurting Gemstar, and they definitely aren't in the charity business!

(2) I thought you had a new book coming out. Where is it?

Yes, I have got a finished manuscript for a SF novel tentatively called 'Guns of the Wisdom'. It was due to be published by Virgin Publishing, but they canceled their original SF/F line based on the poor sales of the first three novels they launched.

'Guns' was one of about 20 titles (I understand) in the pipeline that got the zap. Having seen the high-level of fuck wittedness in the publishing trade up close from my 'real job', I have - as you gathered - backed off from writing. It was difficult to find the energy & time to write when I was winning awards, now that you have to be Terry Pratchett-famous before you can earn a decent crust as an author, I am afraid I have opted for the easy option.

This is to provide for me and my family using my web guru status. I still love writing of course, and half the news stories every month are written by me. I may find some time to squeeze out a few short stories, but novels just take up too much time.

As SF legacies go, creating the most popular SF site in Europe with nothing but the sweat of our collective brow (and the royalties from a seven-year old novel) isn't to be sniffed at. As for the future, who knows what it will be?

If we keep the faith, the future might even turn out to be ... science fiction.

Here's hoping.