Fireside Fiction Company is science fiction’s best-kept secret

You may not have heard of Fireside Fiction Company, but it's time you did. Packed with excellent free science fiction stories, the Patreon-supported publication has been going strong for five years. There are many reasons you need to start reading Fireside, not the least of which is its recent upgrade to GitHub Pages.

You could spend days immersed in Fireside's back content. Editors Brian White and Elsa Sjunneson-Henry curate quality work from well-known writers and rising stars, including Chuck Wendig, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Daniel Abraham (one half of the Expanse writing team known as James S.E. Corey), Cassandra Khaw (whom you may know from Ars), Ken Liu, Daniel José Older, and more. But it's not just White and Sjunneson-Henry's good taste that has earned Fireside a sterling reputation among writers. Unlike many small publications, Fireside pays good rates for fiction. It spends almost all the money it gets from Patreon on its authors and artists.

Fireside Fiction Company also publishes a limited number of books and hosts special projects. One these projects was #BlackSpecFic, a special report on black voices in science fiction. #BlackSpecFic fits into Fireside's overall commitment to inclusivity, publishing stories by people from a diversity of backgrounds and places.

Another way that Fireside is different from your average publication is its commitment to good code. Design and Technology Director Pablo Defendini, who helped launch Tor.com, has kept Fireside's back-end as spiffy as what you see in front. For the site's redesign, he decided to use a static-site generator called Jekyll, and he chose to host it using GitHub Pages.

In keeping with Fireside's writer-centric approach, Defendini's main concern was making the new setup user friendly for editors and writers who might not be very technical. "Working in this way is a big departure from how most editors and authors work—there's no Microsoft Word, there's no WordPress admin, just a bunch of text files and the GitHub Desktop app (or Working Copy on iOS)," he wrote in a blog post about the redesign. "A big part of the process of putting the site together was teaching [the editors] how to use Markdown and Git and making sure that our documentation is comprehensive but easy to understand."

Defendini describes the advantages of the new publishing system:

GitHub offers a service called GitHub Pages, which allows you to serve a website directly from the code in your GitHub repository. As an added bonus, GitHub Pages works really well with Jekyll, specifically. This allowed me to automate the last bit of complexity: telling Jekyll to build the site files whenever an editor adds or edits content, and updating the site with the new files.

So, putting all this together, it turns out that with a little bit of Markdown and Git knowledge, we could make Fireside production as simple as editing some plain text files in a shared folder and making a push to the Fireside git repository.

Having the entirety of the Fireside site living in a GitHub repository brings a ton of useful benefits: from the ability to automatically document the work we do and piping it into our Slack team (which improves our communication as a team) to being able to roll back changes if and when we do something that breaks the site. We've also made sure that the entire site can be edited and updated from our iPads and iPhones, since both Brian and I do the majority of our work on iOS these days. Elsa uses a Windows tablet, and she's covered, too... Additionally, the Fireside repository is public, which means that anyone can check out the repository's readme file to see how the site is organized, log issues, submit pull requests, and otherwise keep track of all of our updates to the site—from big stuff, like new stories, to little things, like fixing typos and bugs or refining the design...

My experience working with Brian and Elsa to get this site up and running has left me more convinced than ever that publishers would be very well served in rethinking their workflows to use the concepts and tools in the software development toolkit.

One of the things that keeps Fireside's fans coming back for more is how the entire site is a giant experiment in futuristic publishing. This is what science fiction should be: a collection of smart, weird stories, served up using the latest tech for a fast, clean reading experience. Give it a try!