Ancient Web: Peter Watts Used His Old Homepage to Give Novels Away

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A novelist's personal homepage used to be part business card, part fan correspondence desk, and occasionally a miniature publishing house. Peter Watts's old Rifters.com pages capture all three roles.

Visit the preserved old Rifters.com index

Watts writes hard science fiction, including the Rifters books and Blindsight. The old index retains an earlier version of his web presence, built around author information, fiction, artwork, interviews, and direct links into the surrounding site.

The design belongs to a web in which a writer could arrange an entire online identity without handing the organization to a publishing platform.

The book did not have to stay inside the bookshop

The most consequential feature of the larger website was its willingness to let readers have the work itself. In 2006, Watts released Blindsight as a freely downloadable novel under a Creative Commons licence, a decision covered by Boing Boing at the time.

Then he made other writing accessible. In an April 2007 post titled “ßehemoth set free”, Watts discussed making the ßehemoth books available after their commercial publication had become difficult for readers to find. These were not mere excerpts meant to drive traffic to a checkout page.

The files and announcements are part of the story of online fiction distribution, when authors could offer PDFs, HTML editions, and downloads directly and then argue with their own readers about whether giving books away was a reasonable career decision.

An author site as an artifact

The old homepage matters because it preserves the front door to that experiment. Later blog posts, updated navigation, and changing publishing arrangements sit beside the older material, but the earlier design remains inspectable.

That separation is helpful. The web did not abruptly change from personal pages to social platforms overnight. Writers adopted blogs and new formats while keeping older links, free files, and homemade archives in circulation.

Watts's sometimes caustic writing style also carries into his public web posts. The site is unmistakably maintained by a person rather than flattened into a uniform book-catalogue template.

Some links and older formats may depend on the reader's browser or on how the site has been maintained; their existence should not be mistaken for proof that every historical file still downloads today.

Rifters.com is worth exploring for the fiction, but the old index shows something else: a period when owning a domain meant an author could personally decide how readers reached the work.

Explore the old Rifters.com homepage and Watts's firsthand account of releasing more fiction.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.