Just the Facts, M'am

It is said that the USA and the UK are two countries separated by the same language, as well as the blue depths of the Atlantic Ocean. How true, How true.

It's always amusing to give visiting American friends a copy of The Sun newspaper over breakfast and watch them choke on their coffee as they realise that page 3 has its news headlines displaced by some Berkshire beauty wearing nothing but her modesty. And this is the UK's best-selling newspaper, too!

Or as a variation on the same jolly jape, you can turn the TV over to an episode of Eurotrash on a Friday evening and watch their well-defined US jawbones ricochet from the floor.

What has this to do with science fiction, we hear you ask? Well, July's pick of the online summer crop is the online presence of Locus magazine. The US news magazine of science fiction. And their US style of journalism neatly indicates the cultural differences in taste between the UK and US.

In the left corner you have SFX, the UK's main print magazine of science fiction. Every glossy issue has some sci-fi babe on the front cover, normally obscuring the bottom descender of the 'F' in SFX, making it look like SEX to the uninitiated fan. Their attitude is part Maxim, part Loaded, and part Monty Python. Let's face it, if someone is going to get called a wanker, SFX is the magazine to do it.

In the right corner, representing the US of A, you have Locus magazine. Respectable, serious, long established ... all the things SFX isn't. Their content is mainly publishing news and books reviews - often a couple of interviews; authors, of course. You're as likely to find Buffy's cleavage popping out of their front cover as you are to find Ms Geller smiling on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Their audience borders on being the trade magazine for the genre. It is the 'bible' read for bookshop staff, buyers, SF/F publishing staff, authors who want to keep track which conglomerate owns their publishing imprint this week, and fans who have had the capital 'F' in fandom burned into their soul with a branding iron.

The magazine's web site, like the print magazine, is packed with book reviews and snippets of trade news from the genre. It's very cleanly laid out by somebody who knows their online design, although its comprehensiveness suffers slightly from not having the full text of the magazine available online.

This might be because, as they state in their own words, "Locus Online is an independently edited website produced as an online supplement to Locus Magazine," by its editor and webmaster: Mark Kelly. This means that while some of their content is adapted from Locus, there is other material found only on the site.

They must have a fairly healthy audience too, as the Locus site recently went offline when they ate their ISP's bandwidth allocation for the month (something that regularly happened to the 'Nest until we moved to Verio, who - touch wood - seem to be one of the few hosting outfits able to handle our traffic highs).

If you're in the market for some 'Just The Facts'-style news reporting in the opinion-light style of American journalism, served up by the proud old man of the SF magazine field to boot, then Locus Online is definitely the place to hang your hat.

Click here to visit Locus.