When the good folk at SciFi.com decided to discontinue Ellen Datlow’s extraordinary SciFiction, the field lost it’s best and most important source of top quality new fiction online. There have been a few attempts to launch something to fill that gap, most notably Jim Baen’s Universe, but nothing has really filled the void left by SciFiction. Speaking as someone who reads fairly widely in the field, and who focusses on short fiction these days, you can almost see the whole left by SciFiction, the work simply not being published.

Into that void steps Bill Schafer’s Subterranean Magazine. After publishing a handful of print issues, Shafer is making the magazine a strictly online venture, and promises a lot of interesting top-notch material. If the Winter 2007 issue – with new work by Lucius Shepard, John Scalzi, and Poppy Brite – is anything to go by, then this is going to be something special. It shows every likelihood of becoming a must-see stop on the web, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it getting a lot of attention in coming months.