Black Gate

Seriously. Monster Island. Scientists at the Melbourne Zoo have now started breeding these giant insects, because apparently no one at the Melbourne Zoo has ever watched a single monster movie.

Four years ago, NPR’s Robert Krulwich’s wrote an in-depth feature on the astounding discovery made by a determined group of Australian scientists who scaled Ball’s Pyramid, the fragment of an ancient volcano that juts out of the South Pacific off the coast of Australia (that’s it above. What did I tell you? Monster Island). Climbing that crag of rock in the middle of the night, the scientists discovered a tiny colony of Lord Howe stick insects, Dryococelus australis, or “tree lobsters,” the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Tree lobsters were native to Lord Howe Island, and were long thought extinct.

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It hasn’t been a good month to be a genre media site.

Less than a month after io9 announced it would be absorbed by Gizmodo, pop-media site The Robot’s Voice (formerly Topless Robot) abruptly announced late yesterday that was shuttering its doors. In his goodbye message, “So Long, and Thanks For All the WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS,” editor Luke Y. Thompson wrote:

I’ve given this site formerly known as Topless Robot three years of my life and hard work, and I wouldn’t trade them. I hoped that covering the subjects and culture that I love would sustain the site. For three years, it has — the three years it took to make The Force Awakens, no less. But all things must end. Today is the The Robot’s Voice’s final day of publication. After years of trying, we couldn’t make this work financially…

To my competition in the nerd-blogging world: I was mostly a one-man show, and I managed to go toe-to-toe with all of you for three years. That’s not too bad, right?

I don’t know where I’ll land next. I own a couple of URLs that I might use to start a project of my own, and no doubt somebody can put me to work writing about movies somewhere.

Topless Robot was founded in 2008 by Rob Bricken and Bill Jensen, and was renamed The Robot’s Voice in September 2015 in an attempt to become more mainstream. It is owned by Village Voice Media, the holding company that once owned The Village Voice. Read Thompson’s goodbye message here.

The changes at io9 have begun, as the site begins restructuring in preparation for its upcoming merger with design and technology blog Gizmodo. Perhaps the biggest change occured yesterday with the departure of founder Annalee Newitz. In her public goodbye, Newitz wrote:

Today is my last day at io9 and Gizmodo. It’s been a long, astounding road, to say the least. I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres… In January of this year, I took on the role of editor at Gizmodo, and since then, Charlie Jane and I have been integrating the world of io9 into Gizmodo. It’s kind of like we joined the United Federation of Planets….

And this is where my path diverges from io9 and Gizmodo. This past year managing both sites taught me that I’m not actually interested in being a manager. I want to write.

Annalee Newitz was one of io9‘s most talented writers, and we certainly understand her desire to pursue a writing career. Katie Drummond will take over from Newitz, and Charlie Jane Anders (whose own first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, will be released by Tor on January 26) will continue as Editor-in-Chief.

io9, one of the most popular locations for SF fans on the web, was launched in 2008 by Newitz and Anders. It covers science fiction, fantasy, comic books, science and technology. The site is owned by Gawker Media, which is restructuring its many holdings to focus more on politics (Gawker’s other holdings, including celebrity gossip site Defamer and Valleywag, which covers Silicon Valley, will be closed down). The merger with Gizmodo has apparently been in the works for months; when completed, io9 will become a section of Gizmodo, and io9.com will redirect to Gizmodo. All existing content will be preserved.

I’ve lived through enough boom-and-bust cycles in this industry to have read plenty of “science fiction is doomed’ prophecies over the decades. It usually happens at the start of a bust cycle, as the publishing industry contracts and readers see steep cutbacks. Funny enough, I almost never see the opposite  — astute readers pointing out the signs of a boom. Joel Cunningham at Barnes & Noble seems to be the exception. Have a look as he catalogs many of the signs of an ongoing explosion in SF & Fantasy publishing.

Hachette Book Group today announced an ambitious expansion of its sci-fi/fantasy imprint Orbit… Beginning in the fall of 2016, Orbit will grow its list by 50 percent, publishing approximately 90 titles a year—and they’re hiring new editors, marketers, and book packagers to do it.

Nothing proves belief in a market like investment, and across the board, publishers are investing in SF/F. Just this year, we’ve welcomed to the fold Saga Press, the dedicated genre imprint from Simon & Schuster that has developed a roster of launch titles unparalleled in the industry (the debut novel from award-winning short story author Ken Liu, anyone?).

Tor.com Publishing has emerged out of Tor Books, the largest player in the genre space, with a new business model that focuses on digital-first novellas, allowing for a faster-moving, more innovative strategy that brings you, the reader, the kinds of books you might never have been able to read before…

Why is this happening? It’s because of all of us. We readers are a passionate bunch, and we’ve voted with our time, attention, and most of all, our dollars, propelling big-money, book-first franchises like Game of Thrones and the Marvel and DC superhero universes to the forefront of the cultural conversation. There’s no stigma about being a genre reader these days, because genre touches everyone — just try getting through December without hearing about Star Wars on the regular (spoiler alert: it isn’t going to happen).

We covered the news of the Orbit expansion here, the launch of Saga Press here, and Tor.com‘s ambitious publishing venture here. Read Joel’s complete article here.