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First and Last Issue of Infinite Matrix 62

Posted by michael from the living-in-internet-time dept.
Code Fixer writes: "The first (and perhaps last) issue of The Infinite Matrix is up." The one and only issue of a would-be science fiction magazine. Good stuff.
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First and Last Issue of Infinite Matrix More

First and Last Issue of Infinite Matrix

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  • HTTP Error 403
    403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected

    This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.

    Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists.

    *harharharharharharhar*
  • Sterlings page looked as if it could have been exiting. Unfortunately its just a famous authors "Links I think are cool" page that you find on most of the homepages on the net. When reading a column by an author I like I expect to hear about the authors life, insights from him etc. A bunch of links to wierd places on the web has been done time and time again. Come on Bruce! we all know you can do a LOT better than that
    • Sterling can't write. Period.

      His books always sound great from the cover text, so I decide to give him one more chance, hoping that his writing has improved with time, and guess what? The book sucks (again).

      He has great ideas, but like a big budget Hollywood movie, he doesn't know what to do with them. Gibson on the other hand didn't have a single original idea since Mona Lisa Overdrive, and his plots are usually going nowhere, but he's a great storyteller. It's the difference between a good writer and a bad writer that makes or breaks a book.

  • The last line of "The Periodinc Table of Science Fiction - Helium" (Michael Swanwick) pretty much sums it up.



    Oh, it's silly of me, I know. But destroying the universe is a lot more fun when the little bastards can see it coming.


    So is it really a first/last issue or is it a ploy to beg and plead for a saviour? PhysicsToday had a similar article about the demise of "The Sciences" which used to be a bi-monthly published by the New York Academy of Science. Instead of dowscaling to pulp and line-drawings they may be trying to hold it hostage so a wealthy benefactor can bail it out. Something about "money better spent elsewhere". Either way, I'll miss it.

    • Whatever the intentions of the authors I must say I really loved "The Periodinc Table of Science Fiction". Bet anyone who likes black humor or Douglas Adams would too.

      And besides, who hasn't played with the idea of dimensional micro and macrocosmoses?
  • and we call CNET doomsayers'

    this Site looks to be very entertaining. (god know's I'm always looking for some way to kill some more of my time) as long as they can keep issues coming out at a rate to keep people coming back often and soon. I dont think they will have a problem.
    • You may or may not have read anything on the site (hell, I can't even tell if you even visited it from your vague post) but you obviously didn't read the letter from the editor that explicitly stated it was both the first and last issue.

      Unless, of course, they actually do manage to find someone with both the capital and the interest to continue funding them. I can't decide whether they're cool or just hysterically desperate for doing that.

  • "If, by any chance, you have the desire and the capital to fund an online science-fiction magazine..."

    Well let's see....

    Space on Geocities (or insert your favourite least annoying freespace server here) total price = £$0

    Dedicated and loyal staff writers who work for free price = £$0

    Irksome and annoying sponsor banner that earn's you .001 each time someone visits benefit = £$2/month

    Total costs/month = £$0
    Total income/month = £$2

    Can I afford -£$2 a month, fits my pocket nicely.
    • Sorry, buddy. Professional writers, editors, and coders want to get paid for their work -- you see, they pay for material goods with that money, shelter and food are useful even for "creative types". And if you can't recognize the difference between professional writing and editing and amateur stuff, there are plenty of half-assed fiction sites out there for your pleasure. Perhaps you'd like some slash fiction?

      (This is not a diatribe against amateur online writing in general, some of which is damn fine. I read a lot of it and a fair amount of the best is done by professionals in their spare time. How far do you think Open Source would get if none of the coders had day jobs?)

  • Business people have a boosterism neurosis and are seriously detached from harsh reality. Everybody reads FORTUNE and SUCCESS, but nobody subscribes to BANKRUPTCY and FAILURE.

    This salient quotation from Week Two [infinitematrix.net] of Bruce Sterling's Infinite Matrix blog, "Schism Matrix," could describe the thinking that inspired Matrix.net [matrix.net] to launch an online SF magazine in the first place. The company wanted to acquire such a cachet of cool among faanish computer geeks that everyone would want to work for them. (I suspect that the company owners, SF fans themselves, also were willing to pay big bucks for this pretext to hang out with cool SF people like Sterling.)

    This kind of hiring strategy only makes sense when the job market, and company management, have both gone completely giddy. It seemed that way to me, back when editor Eileen Gunn talked about this project at last year's ArmadilloCon SF convention in Austin, Texas. Still, it's neither good manners nor good politics to say, "So, you're caught up in a financial euphoria, are you?"

    Another irony of the Sterling comment above is that FORTUNE was the only magazine I saw that pointed out the bubble before it burst, albeit in the late stages. Somebody there wasn't detached from harsh reality. But few paid attention, because pointing out bubbles isn't good manners or good politics.

    • The bubble was officially and loudly pointed out to everyone in every media outlet through August and September 1998, but you were all too busy blowing your wad into it hoping enough wishful thinking could keep it inflated. So it lasted another year and a half. Anyone who wasn't out by April 2000 deserves what they got. VA's opening day was definitely a very loud POP!

  • How come then... (Score:2, Funny)

    by hhg ( 200613 )
    Whyt is it not just called "Finite Matrix" instead?
  • The writing on the Infinite Matrix site is - well, ummm, without trying to be flamebait - shit.

    I tried. I really did. I *tried* to like it. I randomly selected a story from the archives - Mouse Lights [infinitematrix.net], by Richard Kadrey. Three paragraphs of crap. What's the point? Some kid lives in a post-apocolyptic future and has christmas lights. He dies, end of story. Whoop. De. Doo.

    Dr. Real [infinitematrix.net]? Ahem. Dr. Really Boring.

    And Sterling's "my favorite things" list is just that. A list of links. No original thought.

    I am a long-time fan of Science Fiction, I read lots of it. But I am selective in what I read. The web has once again proven that the barriers of entry are so low that anything/anyone can be "published" online. Hey, since I posted to /., does that mean that *I* have gotten published? Time to brush up my resume!

    If this is the last issue online, then it's not a huge loss. If it *isn't* the last issue, pray for some enlightenment. I'm not even talking about lasers and aliens or any of that - just progressive fiction that says something. Don't give me writing that describes worlds, give me writing about characters, dammit!

    Sheesh.

  • HTTP Error 403
    403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected

    This error can be caused if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic. Please try to connect again later.

    Please contact the Web server's administrator if the problem persists.
  • "If we aren't losing our shirts, and if the response is good, we will go on ad infinitum," he said. "I think just knowing that we're planning this and knowing that we have signed up what I would consider some very eminent people really means that we will have an immediate impact on the science-fiction community and I hope on the Internet community."

    hopefully they learned something from the dot-com boom and bust.

    All hype and bad product makes for very unhappy investors. Unless this is being done all on a shoe string type budget, so that the investment is small, and the potential return is large.

    Personally, I can remember a number of artsy science fiction sites that were cool that have since bit the bullet. I had a link I was going to share, but it is lost someplace in my bookmarks collection

    :-)

    - - -
    radiofreenation.com
    is a news site based on Slash Code
    "If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
    - - -

  • I must admit that I have neither read the story or any views about it, but must comment on the story nevertheless.

    The finite matrix is quite an interesting idea. As those of you who have done discreet mathematics will appreciate, Matrixes are quite a complex subject, and are often best solved using coat hangers with bits of paper hanging off them.

    Matrixes are interesting because they are so difficult to visualise. One of their best applications is the parity-check matrix, which can be used to encode data being sent anywhere where it might well be corrupted.
    Such example of this would be crafts being sent to mars... when they beam back down their information, it's a fair chance that a lot of the information is going to be corrupted by cosmic radiation.
    We can use parity-check matrixes to pad-out the information transmitted.

    e.g. 10001000 could become 11010100101011001010 or something of that order.

    By using the parity check matrix, we could check to see which bits have become corrupted and CORRECTLY ascertain their original value.

    This is truly a good thing and for this very reason it has been used in a variety of different applications.

    The finite matrix is truly an interesting if rather pointless name for a sci-fi journal. Why not the infinite matrix ? I think that this would be a much more interesting name as it would lead us to look at a number, such as pi, in binary and attempt to use a matrix to decode it.
    Sadly, pi goes on forever and so we would never truly know the answer, only gaining a bit of information a bit at a time.

    This could well be likened to evolution, but in the electronic sense.

    Well done I say !

  • For example, go to The Universe on the Table [infinitematrix.net], read the story (it's good)... keep on reading... there! You are on the footnote. Do you see that editor's note where it says the author produced the story you just read especially for The Inifite Matrix and that's part of a larger work, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction [scifi.com]? Well, there there's another story, the one that corresponds to Mg (you just read H), called Under's Game [scifi.com]. Ah. That got your attention, didn't it? Go read it. It's hilarious (if you read the original work by OSC)



  • Send him a nice letter [mailto] to say how nice the magazine was, and if you really want another, send some money. Apparently the editor really wants to make more issues, it's simply a funding problem.
  • While the main site is semi broken.. there's a temporary mirror up at:

    http://infinitematrix.planetmirror.com/

    cheers,

    -jason
  • Than never to have published at all. Sigh. Oh, well -- save copies, they'll be worth a fortune some day.
  • Look at the number of posts. The story after this one already has six times the number of posts.

    A magazine lasting for only one issue really didn't deserve to be created in the first place.
  • Yep, this is the last issue, because it was posted on SlashDot.
  • I can see why they're defunct. "Error 403?" Very hip, but kind of light on the content if you ask me. They should've hired a copy editor....

    Oh, wait, is this that /. effect I'm always hearing about (but never see because I read the stories long after everyone else has moved on)?

  • omni (Score:1)

    by thor ( 3901 )
    before slashdot there was omni [omnimag.com]

    • Well, yeah, Omni always had great fiction (Ellen Datlow being a fine SF editor). But the magazine the website have both been defunct for years. I particularly miss the magazine. You're telling me there's no market for a science-and-science-fiction magazine?? C'mon, Gucc.

  • ... too bad they became one of the victims
    of "the past year's stock market decline" [infinitematrix.net].

    Shades of Burn Rate [simonsays.com]...

  • Great another site starts and ends all at once and a community of geeks living out the life of making servers and sites are supposed to all sit and weep for them?

    Give me a break.

    I would have entered some comment on the content of this online mag but I can't!!

    Why? Like every other person so far has noted the site is 403. Please people. Talk about a record setting slashdotting. Nobody got to comment hardly on the content because the thing blew up on itself first.

    Yeah, this really makes me feel sorry for the site or the content.

    If you can't even do a web site or more importantly a web server correctly then do not even bother trying to make web magazine.


  • I like the idea a lot -- the online world is missing out on good SF since the demise of omni magazine. (Maybe Asimov's or one of the other pocket-style magazines is online, but I don't know, and have never really thought that much of them anyway.)

    OTOH, hasn't Bruce Sterling had enough press for a lifetime?

    It'd be nice to see someone start a more amateur SF 'zine -- but the realities of sifting through sludge to find the occasionally good submission would probably quell any such ambitions. Oh well.

  • The site is not down. Some of you techno-geniuses are looking for it at the wrong URL. It is not on a virtual machine at Matrix.net. Try http://www.infinitematrix.net. Eileen

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