The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 24

BIO THE OTTAWA CITIZEN techweekly MONDAY, JANUARY 15, 2001 FD: Umvoi in miw si mis raeirs ft -4 4 -f fl I'fil. ipHi I Continued from page B9 But another of the SF Site's partners, Neil Walsh, says the group is just as happy to help out the little guys: the unheard-of authors who are just starting out or have toiled in obscurity for years. "I think that someone like (popular fantasy author) Terry Pratchett, for example, doesn't really need a review of his new book. People are going to read it anyhow," says Walsh, 35, who's also a correspondence writer for the federal government's department of fisheries and oceans. "But if there's an author you're never heard of from a press that you've never heard of, and if it's really good, I feel it's our duty to let you know about it," he continues.

"There is some good stuff being done by the smaller presses, there is some good stuff coming out from newer authors that no one has ever heard of yet." One author who benefited tremendously from the SF Site was a Canadian writer named Steven Erikson who, until moving back to Canada recently, lived for about four years in England. Last year, Erikson published his first fantasy novel, Gardens of the Moon, through publishing giant Bantam U.K. According to an article archived on CBC Radio's Infoculture homepage, glowing reviews from Internet Web sites reportedly caused Bantam U.K. to take a second look at Erikson. The company offered him a nine-year, nine-book contract worth $1.5 million in October 1999, which he signed.

The deal allowed him to quit his day job working for Toyota, after being unable to find work in his original chosen field of archaeology. One of the reviews that launched Erik-son's writing career was written by Walsh and was placed on the SF Site last year. A snippet from that review is at the very top of the back cover on the Gardens of the Moon paperback. It's arguably the most prominent blurb on the book. During an interview Walsh conducted with Erikson in 1999, the author expressed his gratitude to Internet sites for helping him along.

"I'm very pleased about that," says Walsh of his role helping Erikson vault to the big time. "It's great for Erikson that he could quit his day job and focus his time on writing great books, but it's also gratifying for me as well. If I could do that for other new authors, I think that'd be fabulous." So how did this Web site from Ottawa come to become such an influential player in the SF game? Besides being very generous in helping struggling authors and small publishers, a lot of it has to do with the near-icon stature Turner has in the genre. Charles de Lint says that Turner played a WAYNE HIEBERT, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN Wayne MacLaurin, left, and Rodger Turner operate one of the biggest Web sites for speculative fiction in the world. MacLaurin says they are considering opening up the site to include more reviews for comics, movies, plus horror and mystery novels.

continued to maintain it in their precious spare time. Turner decided to join in afterwards and lend his expertise in retail and programming; he soon found himself handling the top job of editorpublisher. So where does the SF Site go from here? MacLaurin speaks of opening up the site to include more reviews for comics, movies, plus horror and mystery novels. Walsh talks about spinning those genres off into sister sites. There's still the idea of offering books for sale via e-commerce, but that's something MacLaurin says the group is still wrestling with.

"There's the lure of becoming an affiliate to one of the big booksellers and we've purposely stayed away from that. We feel that as soon as we do, there will be the temptation to push books for money rather than because you liked the book. We're just happy to introduce readers to new authors they would have never found before." Turner says he's even entertaining the notion of selling the SF Site to the highest bidder already starting to feel the exhaustion of the work put into it. "We've been putting out two issues a month since '97. We would like to take a break." man, a programmer for Micro Works, and John O'Neill, a former Ottawa resident living in the Chicago area.

He works as a senior business manager for Motorola. O'Neill also runs Black Gate, a Webzine hosted by the SF Site. (O'Neill says he left the SF Site as a partner in July 1998 and was its original publisher. He still contributes the occasional book review or interview now and then.) The SF Site originally began in the fall of 1996 as a means to build an online presence for The House of Speculative Fiction by offering book reviews to the public and to eventually sell books via the Web. "We were thinking at the time of developing a science-fiction portal," says Turner.

"Which is why we put together a boatload of pages that had links to outside of the site." However, the booming big-box bookstore market helped to turned the small, independent bookstore into a memory by early '98. No longer did the House of SF carry bookshelves of science fiction; Chapters was now carrying a wide selection. But, according to Turner, the four partners decided to keep the Web site alive and huge role bringing the World Fantasy Convention to Ottawa in 1984, and is still active with the readers' award balloting for that festival. Turner was also part owner of a Glebe specialty bookstore called the House of Speculative Fiction between July 1979 and February 1998. For years, it was one of the only places in the region where science fiction fans could get their fix of cutting-edge fiction that bigger bookstores wouldn't carry.

Located not too far from Turner's home on Fourth Avenue, the bookstore was immortalized as a real-life setting in de Lint's 1986 novel, Yarrow. Hardcore fans of de Lint's work still reportedly flock to Ottawa looking for the old bookstore on a regular basis. And it was through The House of Speculative Fiction that the seeds for the SF Site were first sown. During the '80s, the four original partners who would help Turner set up the Web site became regular shoppers at the bookstore while they were high school and university students. Some even worked there for a period as clerks.

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