Steampunk Fortnight offered a host of guest bloggers like writers Jared Axelrod and Evelyn Kriete, original steampunk fiction from Eileen Gunn and Cat Rambo, listings of steampunk events, as well as lots of giveaways and swag for the steampunk faithful. That vision includes focusing the site on themes like the just completed Steampunk Fortnight, a two-week follow-up to last year's Steampunk Month-'a month can be an eternity on the Web,' said Nielsen Hayden-offering a focus on a fantasy subgenre about a fictional historical era of futuristic technology powered by steam. We've adjusted that since the site's launch in 2008, but stayed true to the original vision.' Tor's senior editor and manager of science fiction, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who created the original Tor Web site in the 1990s, said, 'Fritz said we could pay for and publish original fiction and it would be cheaper than buying advertising.' Tor.com and its accumulation of original publishing, blogs, and related features is conceived, Nielsen Hayden said, 'to be a continuation of science fiction by other means. While parent company Macmillan maintains a very corporate site for Tor and Forge books, the new and improved Tor.com site manages to offer a little something for anyone who's into science fiction and fantasy.

Tor.com was conceived at a Tor Christmas party in 2007 by Tor's v-p of strategic technology, Fritz Foy-now publisher of the Tor.com site-as a way to create a site that was more than a corporate brochure.

Although a similar publisher site, Random House's, tries to act as an online hub for science fiction fans, Tor.com offers a dizzying variety of original content and commentary that reaches far beyond Tor Books and its authors. Offering an array of original fiction and comics, online communities, commentary, and blogs organized-sometimes loosely-around science fiction and fantasy, Tor.com is an online experiment in transforming a corporate Web site into an all-purpose publishing platform.

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