Review of Bewildering StoriesOne of the best sites on the internet for short speculative fiction is the Bewildering Stories website. Bewildering has a blisteringly fast, weekly production schedule, which they always meet! As of this writing, they are on issue 187, and have the next five or so issues already lined up. Unlike most online e-zines, Bewildering is organized, efficient, and thoroughly professional. This really IS bewildering, because Bewildering is completely amateur - neither charging for their issues nor paying authors for their stories. And yet, Bewildering Stories is such a wonderful venue, that authors are falling over themselves trying to get published there. Each issue reads like a who's who of up and coming authors. If you compare the 'honorable mention' listing in the back of Gardner Dozois' "The Year's Best Science Fiction" anthology with the Bewildering Stories Author Index, you will find considerable overlap. There are reasons Bewildering attracts such talent. First and foremost, Bewildering treats their writers very nicely. The page layouts are clear and easy to read. Each new author gets a welcome page that announces their contribution and also gets a summary page that includes a biography and a bibliography of all their work at Bewildering (with links). The entire site is cross indexed, so that you can move with ease from one story by an author to their summary page to any of their other stories at the site, etc. I used to think they had some wonderful, custom database software to manage all this, but do believe it is done just with patience and care, one line of html at a time. Like the Wizard of Oz, the genius behind this construction is somewhat hidden. The organizers of this site are two gentlemen with the delightfully karmic names of Jerry Wright and Don Webb (who better to run a web based, writing venue?). Their good humor was never more evident than when the Bewildering site was recently briefly hacked and redirected to a Bluegrass Music website. Where other webmasters would probably wail about the wickedness of the world and vow revenge, these two quickly fixed the problem, and good naturedly admitted that some days are just slightly more Bewildering than others. Below are several links that go off this site, and over to various parts of the Bewildering Stories site (or possibly to a bluegrass music site, one can never be sure...). The main front page for Bewildering is HERE The index of their authors is HERE A typical welcome page for a new author (Colin P. Davies) is HERE A typical bibliography page for an author (again, Colin P. Davies) is HERE And finally, the page showing the future schedule for Bewildering is HERE Please check out their wonderful site, but don't forget to come back to NEOSCIFI after you feel bewildered enough. :-) John Gilbert NEOSCIFI founder |