“I regret to announce that — though, as I said, 12 years and 10 months is far too short a time to spend among you — this is the END! I am going. I am leaving NOW! GOODBYE!” [Slips ring on] – Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (paraphrased)

When we started SF Signal in 2003, it was because we loved speculative fiction. Having a blog allowed us to share that love with other fans. We never dreamed it would have grown like it has. In these past 12 years and 10 months, we’ve shared our love of genre, we’ve provided a forum for other fans to come on board as contributors to also share their genre love, we gave authors a place to tell us about the exciting new worlds they’re creating, and I like to think we’ve made a ton of new friends. We even picked up a few Hugo Awards along the way. It’s been quite a ride.

But all good things come to an end.

It was a very hard decision to make, but we have decided to close down SF Signal. The reason is boringly simple: time. As the blog has grown, so has its demands for our attention. That is time we would rather spend with our families. We considered scaling back posts, but it felt like SF Signal would only be a shadow of its former self. So yes, it feels sudden, but a “cold turkey” exit seems like the right thing to do.

We’d like to thank our readers for stopping by and making SF Signal a fun place to be every single day. We’d like to thank our tireless and selfless contributors for providing insightful and entertaining articles purely for the joy of sharing their mutual love of geekdom with like-minded fans. We’d like to thank our hundreds of guest contributors for allowing us to peek inside their creative processes. Thanks to you all! Without you, this fun ride would have been much shorter.

The speculative fiction community continues to be a strong and vibrant one. We may pop up on social media at times, so we’re only partly “slipping the ring on”. For now, we’ll just say…

See you later. In spaaaace! 😀

John DeNardo

JP Frantz

P.S. We believe SF Signal’s archives are a valuable community resource. We’d love to keep it around for a while, even as a static website. We have paid for web hosting through the first week of June. By then we will have to either find a new home for it or say goodbye to it forever. If anyone knows of any free/super-cheap hosting solutions that can hold about 100GB worth of data (and an easy way to migrate it), let us know.

UPDATE: We now have several hosting solutions to review since the announcement. Many of them quite promising. Thanks, folks!

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