Why Dark Establishment

It occurs to me that any new readers of this blog may wonder where the blog's name comes from.

It all started over five years ago, when I was fairly new at my job as SF&F editor at Opus Press. Opus had been publishing genre fiction for several years at the time, but has concentrated most of its efforts on generic fantasy, such as Wheel of Time and DragonLance. Fandom tended to lump it with some other small publishers as purveyors as, well, crap. At the same time, I was serving my first year as a member of the board of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy, which was about to hold its biggest con to date, Icon 99. Many people in online fandom did not see the need for the society, or felt it did not provide nearly enough content and activities for them to join.

As the first official representative of both the SF publishing establishment, and the society to join the IOL SF forum (which was then the biggest SF forum in Israel, and still is, though IOL.co.il is dead, and it's the Ort SF forum now), I was lambasted, attacked, insulted, and generally perceived to be the enemy. I was, to them, The Dark Establishment. The person at whom they could finally vent all the frustration and anger they had about the state of SF in Israel.

Now, five and half years later, most of the people who attacked me are society members, and one of them is the current society chairman. Books published by Opus Press have won a large majority of the Geffen awards, awarded by fandom to the best SF and Fantasy novels of the year. I no longer work at Opus, and no longer serve on the board of the society. But the name Dark Establishment has stuck, and some people still refer to me as such. I've been using it as a nick in forums for years, and when I was looking for a name for my website, a friend suggested I just call it "The Dark Establishment." When I changed format, and made my little blog in English into the centerpiece of the site, while making the old Hebrew site into an archive of sorts, I saw no need to change a name I've grown quite fond of.

And well, that's the story.