We would like to remind everyone that your chums at SFcrowsnest - in those days we were called Hologram Tales of course - have been doing this since 1994.

And this was a time when if you had mentioned the Net, most Large Media suits would have thought you'd be talking about big game fishing.

Anyway, this new fiction area, edited by the ever-ubiquitous Ellen Datlow, is now live, and Ellen tells us she is going live with one original story each week and a classic - read inexpensive - 'reprint' every two weeks.

We're not sure where these reprints are coming from, but Fantasy Age/SF Age magazine is a firm favourite in our mind, given Datlow's connections with these titles. They've launched with Pat Cadigan's short ''Freeing the Angels'' and a classic Heinlein story ''And He Built a Crooked House''.

Currently showing is ''The War of the Worlds'' by James P. Blaylock, who proves that H.G. Wells he unfortunately ain't.

Some other titles that will show up shortly are Kristine Kathryn Rusch's 'Chimera'' and sure to be a great story, ''Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977'' by Kim Newman.

If Kim's excellent parallel reality horror schlock isn't your thing, then the Dune short story ''Nighttime Shadows on Open Sand' by Frank's son, Brian Herbert, and Star Wars writer Kevin Anderson is sure to be a popular success.

New Dune stories for free?

Now even the Bene wossit Witches couldn't have predicted that! Surf on over to them at www.scifi.com