First and Last Issue of Infinite Matrix

Code Fixer writes: "The first (and perhaps last) issue of The Infinite Matrix is up." The one and only issue of a would-be science fiction magazine. Good stuff.

Comments

A product of financial euphoria

[Allen Varney]

Business people have a boosterism neurosis and are seriously detached from harsh reality. Everybody reads FORTUNE and SUCCESS, but nobody subscribes to BANKRUPTCY and FAILURE.

This salient quotation from Week Two of Bruce Sterling's Infinite Matrix blog, "Schism Matrix," could describe the thinking that inspired Matrix.net to launch an online SF magazine in the first place. The company wanted to acquire such a cachet of cool among faanish computer geeks that everyone would want to work for them. (I suspect that the company owners, SF fans themselves, also were willing to pay big bucks for this pretext to hang out with cool SF people like Sterling.)

This kind of hiring strategy only makes sense when the job market, and company management, have both gone completely giddy. It seemed that way to me, back when editor Eileen Gunn talked about this project at last year's ArmadilloCon SF convention in Austin, Texas. Still, it's neither good manners nor good politics to say, "So, you're caught up in a financial euphoria, are you?"

Another irony of the Sterling comment above is that FORTUNE was the only magazine I saw that pointed out the bubble before it burst, albeit in the late stages. Somebody there wasn't detached from harsh reality. But few paid attention, because pointing out bubbles isn't good manners or good politics.

How come then...

[hhg]

Whyt is it not just called "Finite Matrix" instead?

losing their shirts ...

[Alien54]

"If we aren't losing our shirts, and if the response is good, we will go on ad infinitum," he said. "I think just knowing that we're planning this and knowing that we have signed up what I would consider some very eminent people really means that we will have an immediate impact on the science-fiction community and I hope on the Internet community."

hopefully they learned something from the dot-com boom and bust.

All hype and bad product makes for very unhappy investors. Unless this is being done all on a shoe string type budget, so that the investment is small, and the potential return is large.

Personally, I can remember a number of artsy science fiction sites that were cool that have since bit the bullet. I had a link I was going to share, but it is lost someplace in my bookmarks collection

:-)

- - -
radiofreenation.com
is a news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

Woa! Nice stuff if you dig a bit arround!

[m2]

For example, go to The Universe on the Table, read the story (it's good)... keep on reading... there! You are on the footnote. Do you see that editor's note where it says the author produced the story you just read especially for The Inifite Matrix and that's part of a larger work, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction? Well, there there's another story, the one that corresponds to Mg (you just read H), called Under's Game. Ah. That got your attention, didn't it? Go read it. It's hilarious (if you read the original work by OSC)

It is better to have published and lost...

[YIAAL]

Than never to have published at all. Sigh. Oh, well -- save copies, they'll be worth a fortune some day.

finite load of garbage

[ACK!!]

Great another site starts and ends all at once and a community of geeks living out the life of making servers and sites are supposed to all sit and weep for them?

Give me a break.

I would have entered some comment on the content of this online mag but I can't!!

Why? Like every other person so far has noted the site is 403. Please people. Talk about a record setting slashdotting. Nobody got to comment hardly on the content because the thing blew up on itself first.

Yeah, this really makes me feel sorry for the site or the content.

If you can't even do a web site or more importantly a web server correctly then do not even bother trying to make web magazine.