SCIFICTION APPRECIATION: Gavin J. Grant

David Schwartz has just added my appreciation of Gavin J. Grant's "Heads Down, Thumbs Up" to his ED SF Project. (Thanks to Shortly for a suggestion re my entry.)

Ellen Datlow's SciFiction site published a number of truly important stories in her years as editor there, as well as bringing back a lot of classic reprints. She also helped legitimize online publication in a way I personally don't think had happened before in the genre field, despite a number of fine online publications having existed before SciFiction.

At the same time, I suppose I'm one of those who kind of took SciFiction for granted, much as I took Omni for granted when Datlow edited it. Why? Because I thought it was something that would be around forever. Perhaps it is an indicator of SciFiction's excellence that I could think that way. In any event, I'm now sorry I took it for granted because as it turns out, SciFiction was finite in duration, with the last stories published this December.

So, congratulations to Ellen for doing such a sterling job, a chorus of boos to SciFi.com for pulling the plug, and here's to bigger and better things for Ellen in the new year.

In the meantime, visit the site and the appreciation project site. There are a lot of really nice analyses of the various stories. David Schwartz deserves a lot of praise for putting the appreciations idea out there.

Jeff