Ariel is a thirty-something year old married gent, living in Manchester. He currently works as a self-employed freelance web designer, although he is perhaps better known to the world at large as the site editor of the highly successful online magazine The Alien Online.

The Alien Online started its life as a print magazine, however. Ariel worked for six years in the Deansgate, Manchester branch of Waterstone’s (where SF author Jeff Noon also worked), where he was responsible for the SF/Fantasy section, and was also allowed to produce an in-house reviews-based fanzine called The Alien Has Landed, which itself produced a short-lived spin-off in the form of a short fiction magazine called Alien Landings in the mid-nineties. Time moved on, and Ariel left Waterstone’s, but he took his ideas with him and, in January 2002, The Alien Online was launched.

The site now has a dazzling array of talent working for it as reviewers and newshounds. Site traffic is now approximately 75,000 hits per month, and The Alien Online won the inaugural Wooden Rocket Award for Best Online Magazine, and has been frequently nominated for other similar awards.

When Ariel’s not tending to the needs of The Alien Online, he’s busy working on other people’s websites. He has designed sites for fantasy authors Tom Arden, James Barclay, and Miller Lau, as well as for PS Publishing and The British Fantasy Society.

He also looks after the site management for authors Mark Chadbourn , James Lovegrove, and Adam Roberts as well as a second site for James Barclay.

In what laughingly passes for his spare time, he reads a lot of books, especially epic/heroic fantasy, space opera, literary fantasy/SF, and graphic novels, likes an occasional single malt whisky, listens to music, singer/songwriter stuff by preference, and spends time with his lovely wife, Jo.

Profile by Anne M Kletcha