Axxon

Axxón is an Argentine ezine dedicated mainly to science fiction, fantasy and horror literature.

Created in 1989 by Eduardo J. Carletti and Fernando Bonsembiante, Axxón was the first Spanish-speaking magazine published on computer support, also highlighting that it was a self-contained executable program, developed independently by its creators. The main inspiration for the emergence of this literary vehicle was the strong economic crisis that Argentina was going through: monthly inflation close to 200% made any new publishing project almost impossible and especially prevented the appearance of the various science fiction fanzines that had begun to appear. emerged during the 1980s.

Originally the program ran on MS-DOS with a relatively small number of pages. Successive improvements in compression made it possible to include complete novels with illustrations in the reduced size of a 360 kilobyte diskette, as was the case with The Book of the Black Earth, by Carlos Gardini, currently a novel printed by conventional means but that saw the light for the first time as a special issue of Axxón. Subsequent refinements allowed the inclusion of better images, sound, conversion to a completely graphic version and then a version that worked under Windows, always with the idea that the entire program should fit on a floppy disk (which at that time was already 1, 2 and 1.4 megabytes).

Axxón appeared for nine years invariably each month, exceeding one hundred issues, but various circumstances made the preparation of executable issues more irregular. In addition, regular public Internet access was cheaper and easier. All this decided its director to give a new impetus to the publication, transforming the Axxón website from a point of presence for downloading executable programs into the headquarters of a highly active webzine.

Axxon today

Axxon 200 on an Android phone, with Aldiko menus deployed

The monthly issues of the magazine currently reside on the Axxón website, under the editorial direction of Eduardo J. Carletti and a selection of stories by different collaborators over time. The magazine, in addition to the content of stories, presents, depending on the availability of material, a section of Correo, a column on scientific dissemination by Marcelo Dos Santos), and other sections that are difficult to classify, such as They were AnaCrónicas, by Otis, and Hodgepodge, by Saurio. Outside the usual magazine format, as a complement to the site and under the direction of Eduardo J. Carletti, a section of inspiring curiosities of science and history, called Zapping by Axxón¡¡, run by Eduardo J. Carletti and Marcelo Dos Santos, a free literary workshop, literary and film reviews, an art gallery, a large section of literature and science news that is updated frequently, a page dedicated to Héctor Germán Oesterheld, a virtual city called Urbys, a section on possible futures, sections of strips and graphic tables, and the beginning of an Encyclopedia of Argentine science fiction, open to public contributions.

Although mainly aimed at presenting its texts in Spanish, from its main page you can access versions in various languages of previously published stories.

Downloadable formats

The monthly issues can be downloaded for offline reading:

• Since April 2002, Plucker versions are generated, a PDA program that works in Palm OS.
• Since February 2009, an EPUB version began to be published.
• Since December 2012, a Mobipocket version began to be published.

In addition to the new issues, the conversion of the original issues in executable format to the new ebook formats was completed, providing access to most of the content included in them.