Here’s the bad news: there never was another universal town square for science fiction. The community splintered across many different platforms. While that was a real loss, it wasn’t an unmitigated loss. Those communities incubated all kinds of writers and readers who found the SFRT inhospitable or overwhelming.
The most successful successor to GEnie SFRT is Archive of Our Own (AO3), a freewheeling, welcoming, volunteer-run, nonprofit fanfic site with a gaggle of pro-bono lawyers and a deep bench of community specialists and technologists.
The internet came along. It was bigger. It was better. Once web browsers entered the picture, it was easier to use.
GEnie was text-only, accessed via a terminal program that used arcane text commands that were easier to use than, say, a text-based Usenet reader, but still too much for many. When GE finally released its first graphic interface, it was slow, buggy and crude.
But mostly, it the GEnie died because GE didn’t give a shit about GEnie. These were the Jack Welch years, when the company was getting out of the “doing things” business and converting itself into a doomed, cockamamie finance scam.
A mediocre, ultrawealthy sociopath found himself in charge of a once-in-history, all-encompassing town square, and he destroyed it, without even noticing.
[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]
There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:
The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.
There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.
Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.
The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.
As a 16 year old baby writer, putting stories in the mail and collecting form rejections, I found myself in a thriving, accepting community whose members included virtually every living writer I idolized. Many of them became friends. Many of them became lifelong friends.
When I was accepted into the Clarion writing workshop in 1992 and realized I couldn’t afford it, some of the greatest writers in the field mailed me $10 and $15 checks to help pay my tuition.
One of those checks came from Patrick Nielsen Hayden. A decade later, Patrick — then the senior editor at Tor Books, the largest sf publisher in the world — bought my first novel. He’s bought every novel since
GEnie aimed to absorb those idle cycles and fill those empty leased lines. For a flat monthly fee, GEnie subscribers could dial into a special subsection of GEIS designed for socializing — but only between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. If you stayed online after the sun rose, you got hit with a $20/hour dial-in fee.
GEnie was divided into “roundtables” (RTs), each devoted to a different subject: politics, Disney, sports, pets — and, of course, science fiction.
The SFRT (Science Fiction Round Table) was the first and last universal town square English-language science fiction ever had.
This was made possible by a stroke of genius (or accident of history): every paid-up member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA, now the “Science Fiction Writers Association”) got a free membership to SFRT, with unlimited time, including in that 8 a.m.-6 p.m. slot.
Before long, every sf and fantasy (and horror!) writer with a modem in the USA and Canada (and elsewhere) was dialing up to the SFRT and carrying on a kind of infinitely large consuite dream blunt-rotation. Wanna see Damon Knight trading quips with George RR Martin, only to be interrupted by Neil Gaiman tag teaming with Kristine Kathryn Rusch? That happened like every day.
