The Aeon editors are well known -- at least to themselves -- for coming up with occasional harebrained schemes. Most of them are not born alive, or by now we'd be the proprietors of a bookstore, a cyberspace seaside town, and a theme park, among other things.
But many of our ideas have borne fruit, and others vegetables. Books have been written, other books edited and published. Companies have started up, grown, and made money. The stage was being set for a grand and hopefully timely idea, and Æon, the soon-to-premiere electronic anthology/magazine of science fiction and fantasy, is it.
The website has been live for a couple of days now, and I'm tinkering with the site's metadata today preparatory to making Aeon known to the most influential of the search engines. Soon there will be Aeon coffee mugs and mousepads to spend your hoarded nickels on, so watch this space for that. Soon there will be stories coming over our transom, and money going over in the other direction. Soon it will be October and the World Fantasy Convention in Tempe Arizona where we'll preview the first issue to a few hundred of our fellow writers, editors, and related publishing professionals.
Aeon is not a webzine, but an anthology/magazine in eBook form. You'll buy it (You WILL buy it, won't you?) as an instant and inexpensive download from online retailers such as Fictionwise.com or on a CD. You'll read it on your handheld, laptop, or desktop computer. It'll have fiction, nonfiction, and terrific color illustrations. We're lining up content right now from writers on both sides of the Atlantic, Pacific, the Dread Northern Border and the dividing line between waking reality and the Land of Dreams. Some of their names will already be familiar to you from the covers of other magazines and the lists of award winners and finalists. Others will be unknown. But not for long, we promise you.
So stick around as we chronicle what it takes to put together a new and exciting publication, and visit other site areas while you're here. Drop us a line or contribute a comment. Come on up and join the family. We've noticed the air's a little thin up here, and that might account for the light-headedness we've been feeling since the day we said "Why don't we publish a magazine...?"
-BMc
