The prototype is here: https://altscifi.github.io/

You may have seen the link posted elsewhere a few days ago. This post expands on that one and gives you more background information about the zine.

At its best, science fiction can engage with real issues rather than escape from them. That's a major part of what the zine is about. Social unrest sits at the core of most dystopian/cyberpunk approaches to sci-fi.

The zine aims, in some ways, to be the opposite of what BoingBoing has become, if you're familiar with them. BoingBoing has become pure ad-driven clickbait; AltSciFi strives to stay advertising-free and focused on a future-oriented perspective.

And it's not solely restricted to cyberpunk. The purpose is independent science fiction. Cyberpunk is mostly a somewhat ancient aesthetic, nowadays, anyway -- it just happens to mesh well with a "hard sci-fi" (i.e. somewhat realistic) perspective. The zine is for anyone who creates indie science fiction beyond the "fan fiction"/"fan art" level.

There's a fair amount of custom-built code behind the scenes. It's designed as a local system for now, generating output. The idea is to scale up once a decent number of people start to pay for the zine.

Podcasts and readings are definitely on the list of ways to expand the zine. The core purpose of the zine is to give people a way to find independent writers/artists, so we'll definitely take submissions as an avenue for indie artists to find new fans -- and for fans to find indie artists.

One great longer-term goal would be to connect like-minded people in real life. Local meetups could be a great idea.

Questions for you:

• what was the one part of the prototype that caught your eye?
• what's the one thing you liked most?
• what would you want to see more of?
• what's one thing that you'd most want to see in a zine like this one?
• at some point, there may be a print run of the zine. Thoughts on that idea?