Sci Fiction

Sci Fiction was a Hugo Award winning digital publication that ran from 2000 to 2005, during which time it was the leading online science fiction magazine. Published by Syfy (then called the Sci-Fi Channel) and edited by Ellen Datlow, fiction from the magazine won multiple awards including the very first Nebula Award presented to an online-published story. Sci Fiction helped raise the overall status of online-published fiction and has been said to have achieved for online magazines what Astounding Magazine did six decades earlier for print SF magazines.

Sci Fiction was launched in May 2000 as a "prestige object" of the Sci-Fi Channel's website after producer Craig Engler approached Ellen Datlow about starting the magazine. Datlow was already a well-known editor of online magazines, having previously edited the online incarnations of OMNI and Event Horizon.

While Sci Fiction was called a magazine, it didn't exist under a unique url but instead was part of the larger SciFi.com website, with Datlow publishing a new story and a classic reprint each week. The magazine also had its own bulletin board and archives. The magazine paid twenty cents a word for fiction, which was three times the rate offered by the leading science fiction and fantasy print magazines.

Datlow published her first story on May 19, 2000, which was "Freeing the Angels" by Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler, an updated cyberpunk-style story. Sci Fiction quickly became one of the most successful online magazines of science fiction, with Laird Barron describing Datlow's work on the publication as producing a "who's who and what's what list of major award-winning stories."

In late 2005 the Sci-Fi Channel announced that it would be shutting down the magazine, a decision evidently made because the magazine was not a major revenue generator for the channel. Craig Engler of the Sci-Fi Channel also noted that the magazine attracted relatively few visitors and that "keeping track of the rights to its stories was too much trouble." The decision to shut down the magazine was heavily criticized, with Gardner Dozois noting the magazine was "killed by shortsighted corporate bean counters at The Sci Fi Channel." It is believed that part of the reason why Sci Fiction was shut down is because at that time most people used dial-up to reach the internet, meaning longer online fiction was "difficult and slow to access." In addition, Sci-Fi Channel had buried the magazine within their larger website, making it hard to find.

Sci-Fi announced their intention to remove the Sci Fiction archived content as of June 2007, although some of it was still available over a year later. It has since been removed completely.

Many of the stories that were originally published on Sci Fiction are now unable to be accessed and no longer in print, which Mike Ashley says leads people to overlook the magazine's achievements. But Ashley says that despite this, "the status of online fiction set a new benchmark" because of Sci Fiction.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has stated that Sci Fiction "achieved for Online Magazines what John W Campbell Jr's Astounding had achieved for Pulp sf sixty years before." And according to Gardner Dozois, the magazine was at the time "the most important and universally recognized place on the Internet to reliably find SF, fantasy and horror of high professional quality."