A modern author site usually tries to sell you the newest book. Jane Fancher’s older web pages still carry the sediment of an entire career.
Visit Jane S. Fancher’s Web Page
Fancher is a science-fiction and fantasy writer and artist whose work reaches back through prose novels, comics and collaborations with C. J. Cherryh. Her bibliography includes the Groundties books and the Dance of the Rings trilogy, but one of the most interesting pieces of the old site is its connection to Gate of Ivrel.
Before Fancher became primarily known for prose, she adapted Cherryh’s novel into graphic form. Cherryh’s own surviving page about the project directs readers back to Fancher’s site for interior images and describes how Fancher adapted, scripted, pencilled, inked, colored and lettered the work.
That is a lot of verbs for one person.
Author websites used to be personal archives
The surviving Fancher pages are interesting partly because they are not organized like a current publishing campaign.
Old author sites tended to grow sideways. A bibliography would sit beside convention material, art, photographs, personal notes, links to colleagues and whatever else the author felt belonged there. Some sections were redesigned. Others simply stayed put.
That messiness is useful decades later because it preserves relationships that a clean modern landing page might erase.
Fancher’s career crossed comics, speculative fiction, e-books and long-term collaboration with Cherryh. The old web structure keeps some of those layers visible at once. Even the fact that external pages still point back to specific Fancher directories is evidence of the old hand-linked Web doing what it was supposed to do: one creator’s archive reinforcing another’s.
The domain itself has survived through multiple eras of web publishing. Technical snapshots still identify it simply as “Jane S. Fancher’s Web Page,” which feels refreshingly accurate.
CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list repeatedly turns up this pattern. Personal sites often preserve a creator’s career more honestly than a later professional profile because nobody went back and sanded off the weird branches.
Sometimes the obsolete directory tree is the biography.