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000 Main Museum Page
010 Neon Blue Fiction May 1996
020 The Haunted Village July 1996
030 Weekly Serial Chapters 1996-7
031 First Host Electriciti Subfolders 1996+
040 Clocktower Fiction (CTF) 1996
041 CTF Domain History 1996+
042 Pioneers (SF Novel) 1997
043 CTF Listed by Locus Online 1997
044 CTF Listed by Locus Online 1998
045 WayBack Machine 9 Jan 1998
046 Georgetown University 29 June 1998
047 SFF Net

Try-Buy: As in the 1990s, read thousands of pages of exciting, innovative fiction and fascinating nonfiction here free and without obligation. If you like what you read, feel free to tip the barista by buying an inexpensive copy for the price of a latte. Visit Café Okay (http://www.cafeokay.com) to see what we are talking about. We especially hope travelers stuck in airports, in train stations, or on buses and taxis around the world will find us online and enjoy hours of astounding, imaginative reading entertainment.

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Here, for the first time, is a growing collection of documents about my 1996 publishing activities on the Web. They support my belief that John Argo (John T. Cullen, yours truly) published the world's first true e-novels online for download in 1996*. I have previously recounted histories of Clocktower Books (founded as Clocktower Fiction in 1996) here offsite at Clocktower Books and here offsite at Café Okay.

With the twentieth anniversary of our world debut in 2016, and the years marching by, it becomes critically important for historical scholars to have the information I will record here before it is forever lost. I am happy and proud of my own role, along with that of Brian Callahan, and a dedicated band of pioneers starting with our magazine in 1998 including (alfa order) Gwen Callahan, Dennis Latham, John K. Muir, A. L. Sirois, and (later in the game) Sean Farrell. I will separately mention some of the reviewers and organizers involved at Sharpwriter.com 1998-2007.

Our primary goal at the time was simply to revel in a totally new technology with breath-taking possibilities, which was being violently and ignorantly rejected by the publishing establishment at the time (which by 2015 has not anywhere near yet made peace with the future in fact). We naïvely believed our pioneering work, whose vision seemed so clear, and whose many predictions have proven true, would make a positive impact. Becoming rich or famous was not a goal, but perhaps a background noise. It all seemed so real and inevitable, while we never imagined how the world (like SFWA, clinging to its 1930s publishing model; not to mention the rest of the industry) would at best be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Nevertheless, it was a glorious ride, and I will document it here as best I can from our unique perspective. These pages remain heavily under development.

CTF, CTB Logos. Brian Callahan in the early 2000s created the CTB logos found at the top of all CTB web pages. Before any of that, Brian created the gold-and-gray CTF logo at left in 1997. We acquired the Clocktower Fiction dot com (our abbreviation: CTF) domain name in December 1996, as our documents show. Before December 1996, we had already published the two first true e-novels ever published online, as follows. We published Heartbreaker (SF novel; retitled This Shoal of Space) by John Argo on our The Haunted Village website. We published Neon Blue (Suspense novel) by John Argo on our Neon Blue Fiction website. Clocktower Fiction (CTF) was to be our umbrella, omnibus publishing company over separate category sites (suspense, sf/f/h, and others like romance that never happened). In 2000, CTF morphed into Clocktower Books (CTB). CTB continues to publish today on a limited but active basis, averaging at least one or two new titles/authors per year, plus nonfiction books and articles.

*Definition:—By 'world's first true e-novels online' I mean that the novels and stories Brian Callahan and I published, starting in 1996, were (a) proprietary rather than public domain. They were (b) full, standard industrial length, meaning in the case of Neon Blue about 70,000 words and in the case of Heartbreaker well over 125,000 words. Heartbreaker was retitled This Shoal of Space in 1998. They were published (c) online in HTML format for reading and TXT for download rather than on portable media like CD-ROM. They were published (d) complete in weekly serial chapters, one chapter each Sunday evening and downloaded by readers around the world, many of whom sent thank yous and congratulations in a clean and virginal age before sleaze and cyber-crime, when all this was new and wonderful, and intelligent readers appreciated getting something really nice for free, without fear or strings attached.