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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 second 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'.
The
award certainly worked for Stephen Hunt. He sold
thousands of 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! The royalities from 'For
The Crown and the Dragon' and Stephen's later
novels (Court of the Air etc) 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.
Stephen 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.
Then - with an increasingly serious career -
and not enough time to devote to ProtoStellar
in its print form, Stephen 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 hasn't had the time he'd like
to devote to SFcrowsnest.
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 Stephen out by shouldering
some of the load. Stephen has now promoted himself
to Publisher and Head of Programming, leaving
me to deal with the bulk of the editorial gubbins.
And the 'Nest? Well, 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.
Onwards and upwards, dear Nestizens, Ad Astra.
Geoff 'Uncle' Willmetts
PS - Fans of Stephen's fantasy and science fiction
novels looking to get details of his new releases
in the UK and USA etc, can now surf on over to
www.StephenHunt.net
- it's a little microsite hosted by SFcrowsnest.com
which looks at the worlds-N-works of our sci-fi
sugar daddy himself.

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