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2021-2022 Renovation & Updates
Quick History 1998-2007: About Our Authors and Their Fiction & Awards
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We Interviewed Ray Bradbury & Lots More Great Content!
ADDED NOTES: Our talented Columnist Shaun Farrell did an excellent job interviewing some of the most stellar names in SFFH, including Ray Bradbury, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Harry Turtledove, Vernor Vinge, and many more! Likewise, our award-winning Media Critic John K. Muir contributed immensely to the wealth of this magazine's publishing successes during our remarkable decade-long run. Look for Shaun Farrell's and John K. Muir's sections on the splash page. But first, you MUST read the following…
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• Firstlings •
We Published First Stories by Hugo Winners & Made SFFH History!
Firstlings: We Discovered Them, Published Their First Story Ever, and thus Helped Launch Great Careers! See Kameron Hurley and Ted Kosmatka below. Each made their SF author debut (first publication!) in our magazine. Each has become a well-known, successful author across the genre and the industry.
Multi-Hugo Award winning novelist Kameron Hurley is a regularly featured, key columnist at Locus Magazine.
Another firstling (see Ted Kosmatka) is today lauded as Game Master by Locus.
There have been other firstlings, but these spring to my immediate attention as I renovate our magazine in 2021-2022. As was my very deliberate, initial, and well-reasoned strategy going into this, we were a totally professional magazine from Day One in April 1998 by any standards; to this day in 2021 never acknowledged by SFWA, we modeled our professional standards 100% on their rules. [JTC]
We Published At Least Two Top SFWA Executives: See Dr. Andrew Burt and Ms. Linda Dunn below. Both are real Futurians (as opposed to Backwardians); they have been very sympathetic and supportive toward us from the start.
• Big SFFH Names •
Our Authors Won Every Major Award in the Field;
Several Authors Were Top SFWA Executives.
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Added Resource: For each author below, please see the author's listing (usually at Wikipedia). If the story is not listed as shown on our historic magazine websites, please use added reference International Science Fiction Data Base entry to find author name, short story title, and place of (usually first) publication (Deep Outside SFFH). JTC
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Selected Successful Authors We Published 1998-2007.
Maria Alexander (Agnus Dei in
April 2003 issue of Far Sector SFFH) (scroll down to April 2003). Bram Stoker Awards 2014, 2016 etc.
Dr. Andrew Burt, Ph.D.
(DOSFFH Aug 2003) Vice President of SFWA 2003-, 2004-, 2008-
Joseph D'Lacey (Jan 2004) British Fantasy Award/Best Newcomer etc.
Linda J. Dunn
(DOSFFH Dec 2002) SFWA South Central Regional Director 1998-2001
Kameron Hurley (DOSFF Spring 2001 "If Do Women Fall They Lie") columnist Locus Magazine; Hugo Awards 2013, 2014; Hugo Nom. 2020 for novel The Light Brigade; Nebula Nom. & many more;
Trent Jamieson (DOSFFH 'Bounty') Ditmar Award 2003; Aurealis Award 2005, 2008, 2010
Ted Kosmatka
(DOSFFH "The Extinction of Ursus Theodorus" c.2000-1) Author has won 2010 Asimov Readers' Choice Award; 2012 Locus nomination 1st novel; his first story sale was to DOSFFH
Marissa K. Lingen (May/June 2003) Isaac Asimov Award etc.
Brian Plante
(DOSFFH) 1999 Nebula nomination; etc.
Tim Pratt (two acceptances: Jan 2003, July 2001) Hugo Award 2007 etc.
Jeremy C. Shipp (Deep Outside SFFH) author of Bizarro Fiction
Justin Stanchfield
Year's Best anthology 2008; plus: Phobos Anth. edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Olexa; etc.
Paula R. Stiles (June 2003) author/editor collab w/e.g. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jeff VanderMeer, et al. No Wikipedia page yet but soon!
Karina Sumner-Smith (Nov 2003) 2006 Nebula Award finalist etc.
Melanie Tem
(DOSFFH) many awards incl. Bram Stoker 2x, Brit. Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award…
Gay Partington Terry
(DOSFFH) screenwriter, The Toxic Avenger Part II; also Bantam Full Spectrum, Barbara Hutton Toujours, etc…
Pat York
(DOSFFH) 2001 Nebula nomination, short story category.
Moving On: Author Stories. The above is a list of some of our better-known authors published over the decade 1998-2007. We'll add more info in this section as time permits. See above for a few success stories (authors we published, and remain very proud of our great choices).
Clocktower Books (ISBN Prefix 0-7433). Please note also: Clocktower Books in general (our umbrella publishing imprint, still alive since 2001 with Bowker ISBN Prefix 07433) started as C&C Publishers in 1996 with the launch of our two first publishing ventures online.
Civilized Publishing We brought touches of kindness and civilization to the brutal, ruthlessly profit-oriented world of pulp and print cartel publishing. For example, our magazine was well known as having the kindest 'pass' slips in the industry; we never permitted such typical cartel abusive slurs against authors as 'slush pile' or 'rejection' or yet more cruel terminology (which we all experienced in real life).
We Were Professional From Start to Finish. See below for brief info about Deep Outside SFFH and Far Sector SFFH. As already mentioned above, we published stories by such top SFWA executives (sympathetic to us) as Dr. Andrew Burt and Linda Dunn. We were honored to publish one of the last stories by the late Pat York. We were open to simply the best fiction among the hundreds of monthly submissions that came in, regardless of author status, fame, or obscurity. To clarify: the awards mentioned in the list above were not for stories published by our magazine, but reflect the high quality of our selection process and of our authors. Stories and authors above may refer to either Deep Outside SFFH or Far Sector SFFH, or both (same magazine, ten-year run, two titles and modalities).
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For a few Clocktower Fiction history footnotes, please see table at bottom.
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Deep Outside SFFH 1998-2002. During our ten-year run, we published many dozens of authors' SFFH stories at our professional, online SFFH magazine (world's first, following all SFWA rules including author payment etc.). The early 1998-2002 stories published by our magazine as Deep Outside SFFH are still mostly available to be read for free at the Deep Outside SFFH website, now a Clocktower Books Museum site.
Far Sector SFFH 2002-2007. From 2002-2007, we published the same professional SFFH magazine online with some changes. We still followed all SFWA rules for a professional SFFH magazine, including author pay. The difference now became that we published the fiction at Fictionwise, the leading Web-based publisher in the first decade of the 21st Century. Through our association with Fictionwise, we were able to offer the authors' stories for sale (not free), so that we could pay the author regular royalties as applicable. After we closed submissions in early 2007, we continued to sell all of that fiction (and some nonfiction) at Fictionwise until 2012. We were still sending out the last royalty payments to authors in early 2013.
Fictionwise (to 2012). In 2009, Barnes & Noble purchased Fictionwise and then, in 2012, shut the entire Fictionwise operation down forever. Better said: arbitrarily erased the entire operation, not even leaving a legacy museum site. A huge chunk of that rich, wonderful literary treasure dating 2000 to 2012 essentially vanished. Yes, not all of it was timeless or poetic literature in any sense; but collectively, it was a literary treasure, a lost library, for which we may 'thank' (blame) the usual avarice, myopia, and ruthless greed of the pulp & print cartel. Maybe one day, far out in a holographic ΝεΦελη near Orion or Marzipan, future historians may unearth a sort of nebular Gilgamesh library of broken, faded virtual clay tablets from the early Internet publishing days, pointing to a lost city of Fictionwise. Some day, the truth about that twilight zone of early digital publishing will be told, along with the Orwellian, fierce war taking no prisoners waged against the Futurians by the Backwardians. Long story short, as Far Sector SFFH publisher at the termination of Fictionwise, John T. Cullen decided to freeze that moment in time rather than re-negotiate contracts with the dozens of authors. Time to move on.
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A Few Related Quick History Notes. Starting April 1998, we (C&C Publishers, Brian Callahan and John T. Cullen) were online publishing what I now call HTML fiction (free, before e-commerce, entirely online in HTML code to be read online, not on portable media; and most importantly also, proprietary, not public domain, which eliminates Gutenberg Project and other public domain scavengers).
We were online publishing HTML Fiction before the Wayback Machine was ever conceived (1998). The best record of our early existence is now to be found at the Clocktower Books Museum site in John T. Cullen's webplex of interlinked websites. For historical info, you may also visit our live website at Clocktower Books. The original umbrella publishing imprint was Clocktower Fiction (Dec. 1996), which morphed mid-2000 into Clocktower Books to embrace nonfiction and poetry as well as fiction.
The Clocktower Fiction domain eventually (live and learn) got into the hands of squatters, who made the site unavailable to search robots of Wayback Machine, so that no screenshots of the site are shown at the Wayback Machine. When we offered to buy the domain back, the squatters tried to extort thousands of dollars from us in order for the squatters to enable robots again (no can do, and they will probably hold it forever out of spite). Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine makes itself a victim to such predators and their evil by refusing to stand up for the historic value of important Internet artifact sites stolen by such creatures, who in the material world would be classified as looters and grave robbers like those who stole tens of thousands of ancient artifacts from the ruins of Iraqi cities after the fall of Saddam Hussein (just one example). Luckily, Clocktower Books was able to grab a rough screenshot of Brian Callahan's original c1998 index page (see CTB Museum site at Wayback early on, before the domain got into the hands of the turd-squatters as we call such predators.
There is a lot more historical info, some great, some grim, which we'll relate later as time permits.
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Information overload, I know, but we've been around a long time, we've done a lot, and we (and our authors) have not had the attention we deserve. Now, in 2021-2022, it's time at last! Hello (again) World. JTC Sep2022.
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Pioneers & Innovators 1996 to Forever. The following information is copied from an important page at the 2021/2022 Reno of Far Sector SFFH. It's the Read First page, created by JTC in 2021 to highlight the wonderful men and women authors we published during our heyday as the world's first web-only online SFFH magazine paying professional rates dictated by SFWA and following all of SFWA's rules (but never recognized by SFWA). Note that we even published stories by at least two high ranking SFWA officials (Andrew Burt and Linda Dunn). Go figure.