It's over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.

The Sci-Fi Channel has killed off SciFiction. Presumably, Ellen Datlow is now looking for work:

In an apparently sudden move, Scifi.com has announced the ending of Sci Fiction, the online publishing division of of the site, at the end of 2005.

Edited by Ellen Datlow, Sci Fiction has been online for nearly 6 years and received great critical success. Works published at Sci Fiction received Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

A farewell message from Ellen is published at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/message.html.

New original and classic fiction will continue to be posted until the end of the year.

SciFiction published some high quality fiction, but more than that, it had the highest readership and by far the best pay rates in the biz. I never managed to sell anything there, but I did get some encouraging feedback from Ellen over the year. Ellen's farewell message is as interesting for what it doesn't say as for what it does:

Stories on SCI FICTION have been nominated and won major genre awards: Linda Nagata's novella "Goddesses" won the first Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction Writers of America) ever awarded for a piece of fiction originally published online. Lucius Shepard's novella "Over Yonder" won the first Theodore Sturgeon Award for short fiction ever won by a piece of fiction originally published online. SCI FICTION itself won the Hugo Award in 2005 for Best Web site.

I'd like to thank you all for reading the fiction and hope you'll continue to read it as long as it's archived on SCIFI.COM.

New original and classic fiction will continue to be posted until the end of 2005.

I suspect some brainiac in a suit--probably the same one that thought it'd be a great idea to buy the 1-800-TREKKER SF merchendise catalogue, convert it to an online store and then shutter it almost immediately--woke up one morning and said "Hey! Why are we wasting money on SciFiction? Nobody reads anymore!" The jerk. I suppose the only real surprise here is that SciFiction lasted as long as it did. SciFiction got a good six-year run, and Farscape only lasted four, after all.

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