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InterText

Entry updated 21 August 2012. Tagged: Publication.

US amateur Online Magazine produced and edited by Jason Snell (1970-    ). It ran for 57 issues from March 1991 to December 2004, maintaining a bimonthly schedule for 49 of those issues up to Fall 1999. Although InterText was not dedicated wholly to science fiction, the majority of its contents was Speculative Fiction and Fantasy: it was one of the earliest such online magazines, following FSFnet and Quanta. Snell himself acknowledged the precedence of Quanta and Athene, the latter produced by Jim McCabe, which ran for seven issues (September 1989-July 1990) and was a general fiction magazine. Snell founded InterText while he was at the University of California, San Diego and continued it for thirteen years while he developed his career at Apple's Mac Publishing. The early issues were really E-Zines distributed via email in plain text and PostScript formats. The magazine was not set up on a website until #23 in January 1995, but Snell promptly reformatted all the previous issues and archived them online. Those archives still survive, meaning that readers can still gain complete access to all issue of InterText, unlike those of many of its contemporaries and successors.

The pagination of InterText would vary considerably, but most issues were usually between 20 and 28 pages, so it was never a large magazine and rarely ran more than three or four stories and an article or two, plus Snell's editorial. Snell did once gamble with a serial, "The Unified Murder Theorem" (January/February-July/August 1992) by Jeff Zias, in which Aliens become desirous of Earth's digital technology. InterText had many regular contributors but only a few that became known beyond the magazine. Tarl Roger Kudrick, who went on to edit his own literary magazine On the Premises, first appeared in the March/April 1992 issue and P R Morrison, author of two young-adult fantasy novels debuted in the September/October 1992 issue. InterText was not averse to using reprints and that way managed to feature Robert Deveraux with "Fructus in Eden" (March/April 1993) from Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine (Fall 1990) and, perhaps more surprisingly, Richard Kadrey with "Horse Latitudes" (July/August 1995) from Omni Best Science Fiction One (anth 1992) edited by Ellen Datlow. Other contributors include Tyree Campbell of Sam's Dot Publishing, S Kay Elmore, Ceri Jordan, Mark McLaughlin and Patrick Whittaker, who headlined the final issue with "Father Christmas Must Die!!!" (Fall 1999).

InterText was a reliable magazine that established many of the early standards for online publishing and kept on developing them. [MA]

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