A right Flare for science fiction

From the pen - or should that be HTML editor - of Eoghann Irving comes a home grown science fiction zine in very fine feckle, SFlare.com

It's always a bit dangerous to register a URL which attempts a pun by missing out one of the letters, as was proved when someone mentioned to us a con recently that we ought to review SF Flare or Solar Flare. We actually typed out SFflare.com rather than the genuine missing 'F' URL of SFlare.com - and it wasn't registered and we got the dreaded 404 not found error.

Of course, back in the 90s SFcrowsnest.com's search engine section was called SCI-FInder, until some smart alec thought, yeah, cool name, and registered SCIFInder.com (a SF search engine, oddly enough).

Well, no-one except the very large corporates like Yahoo can afford to register all the misspellings of their domain name, section names, brands, characters, and various country-specific domains such as the .de, .co.uk, .co.jp etc, so let's not dwell on past mistakes, eh.

Anyway, the excellent SFlare is full of a goodly number of comic and graphic novel reviews, has a nicely laid out SF directory, as well as a host of book and films reviews.

Being a professional type, Eoghann has also bolted on the obligatory community (read bulletin board).

One note of something you don't get to see on too many SF sites, he's got a nice section on PbeM (play-by-email) games, and he is apparently setting up a project to create and host free PBeM games.

His aim is to offer people who want to run a PBeM the tools, webspace and rulesets they need to do so.

There's also an archive of book reviews written by members of the FSF mailing list and links to the books at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (so you can buy them if you're feeling flush).

Visit Solar Flare over at www.SFlare.com