Xenite.Org – Science Fiction and Fantasy Websites

Portfolio Writer
Xenite.Org is an independent science fiction and fantasy Website actively published since March 1997.

Xenite.Org is an independent science fiction and fantasy Website actively published since March 1997.

Michael Martinez launched Xenite.Org in March 1997 after several months of planning and experimentation. Xenite.Org was the fifth Website Michael had built since August 1996 and it was the first independently registered domain name in his portfolio. Xenite.Org was registered several weeks prior to the .COM and .NET versions of the domain. All three sites have been owned and operated independently of each other but Xenite.ORG is the one that became world-famous.

The name “Xenite” was chosen by a majority of fans of the syndicated television show Xena: Warrior Princess as the name for their fandom. A close rival was the now-abandoned Xenaphile. By a happy coincidence “Xenite” is also the name of a fictitious mineral from the original Star Trek television series, and so this science fiction and fantasy domain came into existence with an inherent association with two popular television shows.

But Xenite.Org was always about so much more than TV shows. Michael was an avid fan of SciFi books and movies, too. An aspiring writer, he went on to develop popular bi-weekly and weekly columns for the original Suite101, then a platform for freelance writers who were paid small by regular stipends. Michael’s first column was devoted to Xena and Hercules TV show topics and fandom, but he eventually started a column about J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth. As early as 2001 Michael’s weekly readership reached 30,000.

Thanks to the popularity of Xenite.Org and his Suite101 column, Michael went on to publish several books. He has been interviewed and quoted by television, radio, and print media around the world. And Xenite.Org was just the beginning. The original Web forums on Xenite.Org became so active and popular they had to be spun off to their own domain, SF-Fandom.  And SF-Worlds was another spin-off.

Through the years there have been many changes on Xenite.Org.  Today it is home to more than a dozen subdomains, each striving to be as interesting as the heritage that it is a part of.  The most popular section on Xenite.Org is unquestionably the Tolkien and Middle-earth blog where Michael has published hundreds of articles, including many answers to interesting fan questions.  The question queue is so long it would take more than a year to publish all the answers, but no matter how many articles Michael publishes readers keep submitting more questions.

No profile of Xenite.Org would be complete without mentioning the legendary Xena Online Resources.  Although the original Web directory Michael launched in 1997 is no longer active, XOR continues to exist as a subdomain on Xenite.Org where fans can search many Websites thanks to a Google Custom Search Engine created for fans of Xena.  The site is dedicated to the memory of Michael’s old friend Cheryl Harrison (aka “Dixie”), who took over management of Xena Online Resources when it became too big.  Under Dixie’s leadership the team of a dozen volunteers built the largest Xena and Hercules Website directory in the world, with more than 2,000 active listings at the height of the shows’ popularity.  Even Yahoo!, the most popular Web directory in those years, only boasted a fraction of similar listings.

Here is a list of the current sections on Xenite.Org:

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