Live performance on September 28.  Studio version available now at:

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.

But the other reason the community never recohered is that we kept trusting other businesses to own those communities, and they kept betraying our trust. Prodigy wanted us to “stop talking to each other and start buying things.” Livejournal purged its queers.

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.

Sound familiar?

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

.I wasn’t the only fan or aspiring writer to join that endless consuite. It was huge. It was vibrant.It was amazing.And then, it died.

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.