A science fiction and fantasy site not quite like any you’ve seen before, mixing news, commentary, original stories and art, your own comments and conversations, and more. A place on the net you may find yourself wanting to visit—and participate in—every day.

Once you register, you’ll receive our newsletter and a link to download a digital book, as well as free wallpapers from bestselling and award-winning SF and fantasy authors and artists. And you’ll receive a link to another new book, and new wallpapers, every week. Additionally, you’ll be entered in our Watch The Skies Sweepstakes to win the very cool Asus Galaxy EEE mobile PC.

When I was in second grade, I discovered the Hardy Boys series. Ever since, I’ve loved to read — both for fun and to improve my mind. And I’m always looking for the next great book. Reviews on Amazon and other sites are helpful, but I thought there might be a better way.

One afternoon while I was scanning a friend’s bookshelf for my next great read, it struck me. When I want to know what books to read, I’d rather turn to a friend than any random person, bestseller list or algorithm. So I thought I’d build a website — a website where I could see my friends’ bookshelves and learn about what they thought of all their books.

Goodreads is that site. It is a place where you can see what your friends are reading and vice versa. You can create “bookshelves” to organize what you’ve read (or want to read). You can comment on each other’s reviews. And on this journey with your friends you can explore new territory, gather information, and expand your mind.

Knowledge is power; and power is best shared among friends.

For the last five years, I’ve stood on the sidelines of this endless scrummaging, with feelings that range from mild curiosity to irritation to fascinated disbelief. I’ve haunted the messageboards and the blogs and the con panels, I’ve even occasionally dipped my toe into one pool of critical vitriol or another — Clomping Foot of Nerdism, New Weird, “political” SF — but mostly I’ve just watched, in much the same way I guess you’d watch footage of those guys in Shia Muslim nations battering themselves in the head with sharp objects until the blood clots their hair and streams down their faces from their lacerated scalps and evidently makes them all feel really good about themselves. O-kay, guys. Whatever gets you off, I guess.

…

“Consolatory” fantasy does well. So does “consolatory” Space Opera. People like it, and so, not unreasonably, they buy it by the ton. Of course, it’s become customary in genre debates to sneer and blame this sort of thing on marketing — as if without the marketing departments, Terry Brooks fans would suddenly be marching en masse into Barnes and Noble and demanding a reprint of In Viriconium; as if marketing is what prevents the readers of Star Wars tie-in novels from developing a passion for Stanislaw Lem. I mean, come on, guys, get real — enough of the false consciousness rap, already. People know what they like (and, yes, sadly, they tend to like what they know). And a large number of such people within the SF&F readership like straightforward, by-the-numbers story-telling with a lot of sensawunda, heroes who achieve their goals, bad guys who go down hard, and a solid happy ending. In this, they are no different than the reading (or indeed TV, or cinema-going) public in general. Marketing is simply a system for shifting product to that public in as large quantities as possible. And I never met an author yet who didn’t want their books to sell in large quantities.

So. This is the landscape around us, and we all know what it looks like. What we need to do is stop qvetching about the terrain, and just decide where we’re going to pitch our bloody tents. Ian McEwan argues (obliquely, through conversation and event in The Child in Time) that good writers write for themselves, and I think probably that’s true; certainly I try never to write for anybody else. But writing for yourself does carry an opportunity cost. If you’re lucky, your self shares tastes with enough other people that your books are going to sell well; you can hand your finished product over to the marketing guys, and they’ll run with it. As Neal Asher once remarked to me, I don’t mind doing the crowd-pleasing stuff because most of the time what pleases the crowd also pleases me. But if that particular piece of serendipity doesn’t happen for you, then you’re simply going to have to make a choice. Want to make a shit-load of money? Want to make the bestseller lists? Then get on and write a three brick fantasy trilogy about a good hearted farm-boy who becomes a wizard or a warrior (or a space pilot) and defeats an evil empire. Want to write grim and gloomy portraits of emotional decay in unemployed, divorced or otherwise alienated Londoners who may — or may not! — have come from an ever so faintly different parallel universe? Prepare to keep your day job for some time to come.