Nick Gevers and Keith Brooke have interviewed each other in order to tell us all about the anthology the two of them have compiled and edited, Infinity Plus, and the website of the same name that they set up to showcase free works of fiction.
Gevers: How were you originally inspired with the idea for infinity plus? Was it at first difficult to persuade writers to post their work in this novel floating anthology/forum?
Brooke: Way back in early 1997 I went on a one-day course to learn to write HTML. This was for my day job in educational multimedia, but immediately I saw the potential for a fiction website. Initially I was just going to put some of my own work online, but then I mentioned it to one or two friends in the business and realised that if we grouped together there was far more potential. On the one hand, writers were just becoming aware of the web back then, but with a handful of notable exceptions almost no-one knew how to exploit it, so my newly acquired skills might come in handy; and on the other hand, the idea of a bunch of writers getting together, putting work up for free and sharing their readers around just seemed to catch the mood of the moment.
Gevers: When you founded iplus, did you anticipate it growing to the extent that it has? How many words does the site now contain?
Brooke: I had no idea what I was letting myself in for! In August 1997 the site went up with stories from me, Stephen Baxter, Michael Cobley and Eric Brown, plus a handful of reprinted book reviews, and I sat back and thought, "Job done." Little did I know... As I say, the concept caught the mood of the moment, and everyone I mentioned it to leapt at getting involved; soon writers I didn't even know were approaching me.
So somehow I ended up with a site that, for most of its ten years, has been pretty much a weekly magazine; the non-fiction is mostly new, the fiction is mostly reprinted from elsewhere, though there are quite a few original stories, and novel extracts that appear at the same time as the novels themselves.
I've just finished putting together the content for our tenth anniversary update. It'll be a big one, with close to 70,000 words of fiction from people like Paul McAuley, Kit Reed, Paul Di Filippo, Nicola Griffith, James Patrick Kelly and others. This will bring the site up to 2,150,000 words of fiction, over a thousand book reviews and more than a hundred interviews, plus lots more.
It's been a huge effort to manage a site on this scale over such a long period, and I couldn't have done it without a great deal of help, both from the contributors and from two people who stepped in on the editorial side: Paul Barnett, and yourself, Nick. How did you come to be so closely involved in the site? What made you approach me all those years ago?
Gevers: Thanks, Keith. I think what first drew me to iplus was its openness, its generosity of concept--free access to a great quantity of high-quality work, all in a spirit of promoting the fantastic genres in principle as well as in the case of many specific writers. Almost evangelical, you could say! This was literary idealism in practice... And at the time (1999), I was a newcomer to active writing and publicity in the SF field, and iplus was a great place to publish my reviews and interviews, get feedback on them. So my involvement began, with that review of Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson, one of many authors I've since worked with professionally. Iplus, along with Lawrence Person's famous print zine Nova Express, was where I cut my teeth as an SF critic and editor, and so in a sense, Keith, you grew me from a bean.
Brooke: Lovely! You've since gone on to be very active in the SF world, in a variety of editing and writing roles. Tell me more about these roles, and how they relate to your time with infinity plus.
Gevers: Well, as I say, iplus made me. My role with the site led to publication in various other venues—SF Site, SF Weekly on the web, and Interzone in print; then came the offer to write a books column for Locus, which soon grew to two columns. All of this happened with extraordinary rapidity... All the reviews I've written for Locus have their origin and inspiration in the ones I wrote for iplus--a particular voice, a particular earnestness of interpretation. And acquiring and editing stories for iplus led to my present role as Pete Crowther's deputy at PS Publishing...
Brooke: Where do you think SF is going? Is the future of SF online, or will the print magazines survive?
Gevers: I'm very confident that short fiction remains the incubator of SF, the form where its ideas, styles, and movements are born, so online anthologies and fiction sites like iplus, Subterranean, Helix, Flurb, Ideomancer, Baen's and so forth are crucial to the health and survival of the genre, probably as much as the print zines, which, with their high printing and distribution costs, remain an endangered species. The sites offer genre writers excellent opportunities to showcase their work to a huge outside web audience... Print markets remain crucial too, though--not only zines like F&SF and Asimov's, but also a new wave of high quality anthologies, a major trend just now and I hope for a long time.
As for longer SF and fantasy--novels--that'll remain primarily a print medium for now, thanks to economics and logistics of an obvious nature, but even there electronic release is feasible, as witness the pioneering work of Messrs. Doctorow and Stross.
Keith, how do you feel about the future of SF online, and the competing virtues of print and pixels?
Brooke: I think infinity plus was very much a child of its time: we got going just as writers and readers were starting to explore the possibilities of the web, we attracted some fantastic authors and from there we had the momentum to just keep going: iplus was a place where writers wanted to appear. I don't think anyone could start something quite like iplus now. If someone approaches me about putting one of my stories online, my first reaction is to ask how much they're paying, and that's quite right: the web has matured, it's a professional medium now. I like to think there's still room for creative thinkers to try different approaches, and the web is a wonderful place to do that, but it's a very different environment from how it was in 1997 when we started.
Print and pixels? Well, we've always worked on that borderline at infinity plus: a few years back you and I co-edited an iplus edition of Interzone magazine, and we have the print anthology from Solaris. I hesitate to predict where markets are heading, both for short and long fiction, but there's a hell of a lot of good stuff out there right now, and that has to be healthy for the genre. It's an exciting time to be part of the SF and fantasy world, but then I guess I'd have said the same thing ten years ago too and I'm confident I'd say the same thing in ten years' time as well: it's a great field to be active in.
