READ FIRST    2022 RENO NOTES    REFERENCES    2021 RENO NOTES:    2021 A START    2007 B JUMP    2021 C UPDATE    CTB MUSEUM    HOME    HELLO

2021 Site Renovation Info Pages

A. 2021 RENOVATION NOTES

(Pages A, B, C, and D follow; pls click the links starting with A)

Welcome. I'm John T. Cullen, original publisher of Far Sector SFFH under the Clocktower Books aegis. In 2021, I have been moved to make some updates or renovations to this site.

These Far Sector SFFH museum pages remain essentially the same as when we closed the magazine in early 2007 after a very successful ten year run, which drew avid readers and raves from all around the world. See our Awards page as of 2007; clickable image at right is our Event Horizon recognition/link award from Ellen Datlow, when Ellen was publishing her online successfor magazine to her successful run with Bob Guccione's famous Omni SFFH magazine.¹

Any website will 'decay' after many years in museum status. For one thing, a change to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) caused numerous broken links.

Secondly, by early 2021, Adobe disabled its Flash animations, which removed our classic Little Green Man (created in the early 2000s by author, artist, musician, and all-around wizard Al Sirois); that left an unsightly void at the top of the masthead/first page. I was lucky enough to find a slightly older banner done by Al Sirois, which he intended for our masthead; but he then replaced it with a cool, funky animation. I was lucky enough to also find an original sample that Al sent to me for review before he went forward with the actual Adobe Flash animation. More on that on the Renovation page of this update.

¹ NOTE: Historical Details: As my Clocktower Fiction/Books co-founder Brian Callahan reckoned at the time, Ellen Datlow's Event Horizon was the world's first professional online magazine of SFFH. Our magazine Deep Outside SFFH, launched by us online in April 1998, was technically 'the world's first professional online magazine of SFFH without print antecedents' (Brian's precise formulation, which will hold true forever). Specifically, my design at the time was to create an online magazine whose professional standards exactly followed those laid out as law by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). Deep Outside SFFH became Far Sector SFFH under my sole tutelage after the departure of Brian Callahan (whose future ventures would include holding a key position in the annual Portland, OR H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival). Sadly, SFWA has to this day refused to recognize the existence and historical importance of Deep Outside SFFH, which became Far Sector SFFH over its ten-year run from 1998 to 2007. That's a long story, to be told separately as part of the overall history of the early Web-based SF magazines and publishers.

Planet Magazine. As an exception, one venerable publication (Andy McCann's Planet Magazine) is recognized by a Wikipedia page. Their magazine did not pay authors (a key SFWA rule, with a certain minimum of three cents per page); and I must note that my own short story Control Game was published by Andy McCann's Planet Magazine in its 1997 issue. It is the only SF story of mine that anyone ever 'has published.' I gave up on the submissions game decades ago, and was happy in the late 1990s to be able to start publishing my own work on line and in print.

Quick Reference Links:
Ellen Datlow "…fiction editor at Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies. She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008 (with Terri Windling until 2003, later with Gavin Grant and Kelly Link until the series ended[2]). She was also editor of the webzine Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror from 1998 to 1999, as well as Sci Fiction until it ceased publication on December 28, 2005…"
Omni Magazine (1986-1998).
Planet Magazine (1994-Forever/ongoing!).

Control Game/Publishing Wars Why have you not heard more about us? The early web-based magazines were mostly ignored and forgotten. They were, and are still, often referred to disparagingly by terms like 'webzine' or 'amateur' to distinguish them from so-called 'pro' magazines, meaning four or five pulp magazines dominating what Dean Koontz once called 'the science fiction ghetto' of a 1930s modality. We were ignored (not yet feared and hated) in large part because the pulp industry had not yet become sufficiently cognizant of us to begin a negative, destructive campaign whose ramifications are still felt in the 2020s. Funny to say, the New York City publishing cartel at large waged a similar war of hate and repugnance (think of it as greed, ignorance, and inability to adapt) against the paperback industry from the period after World War Two until into the 1970s. More on that coming shortly. Because we were ignored by the print dinosaurs, who dominated book reading until the 21st Century, there is no Wikipedia page for professional Internet-based magazines like our own. One noticeable exception has been Andy McCann's venerable Planet Magazine, which has continuously published as an alternative to pulpitude since 1994. Here is the free copy of my short story Control Game. You can also read it at my sampling website Galley City. It is the only story of mine that anyone has ever 'published' (passive voice). Since the late 1990s, I have been content to publish my work (active voice) and bypass the middle-persons and bottom feeders (with one or two glaring exceptions that I'll talk about another day). I might add that I self-published my first book in 1980, and registered copyright with the Library of Congress that year; the title was Pauses: 64 Poems by John T. Cullen. Those poems are now part of my collected, self-published omnibus of more than 400 poems, titled Callin Earth…Can Anyone Hear Me?. The cover features an astronaut in far space, desperately trying to reach anyone who will listen on the home planet. I'll tell more writer stories soon. JTC

TOP