| | Here are our main goals with this site:
- Build a comprehensive and accurate database of SF/F writers, with their bibliographies, biographies and pictures, and links to relevant web sites.
- Keep track of new book releases and series.
- Inform on the history and evolution of SF&F, its themes and subgenres.
- Promote science fiction and fantasy as worthwhile literary genres.
- Provide convenient book shopping options, both for in-print and out-of-print books.
- Earn enough revenue to sustain and grow the site.
- Become an overall better resource as time goes by!
Decades ago, a science fiction fan was a person who read the SF pulp magazines. The pulps died, but hardback, paperback and to some degree digest SF magazines flourished. SF wasn't a big world, but it grew. Meeting a science fiction fan usually meant meeting someone interested in the space program, a person who loved to read Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, and a person who kept up with the SF field by reading prozines and fanzines. After Star Trek and Star Wars, meeting a person who called themselves a science fiction fan no longer meant they read the books and magazines. SF evolved into an industry of multimedia franchises. For decades the number of science fiction fans have been growing, but the sales of books and magazines have been declining.
SciFan wants to help preserve the old style SF fan, who was first of all a book reader. New SF writers were people who grew up in that fandom, and knew the history of the field. We're afraid of a publishing world that would turn SF into one big multimedia tie-in industry, and we would lose the small exciting world of SF that we love. The internet and other technologies such as ebooks or print-on-demand are opportunities for "backlist" authors to be saved from oblivion, as well as help new writers to meet their public and grow their readership. | |
