The New York Review of Science Fiction

Spring Forward

From NYRSF ISSUE #249, May 2009

Ah, the weather is improving as April progresses, as it should. Global warming progresses, and is taken ever more seriously, as it should. The price of oil goes up, as it should not. Source Interlink, the distributor that accounts for 25 percent of U.S. wholesale distribution, has settled its lawsuit with the magazine publishers to its advantage in order to stay in business for the moment. The angel Warren Lapine has announced the purchase and continuation of Realms of Fantasy. Major US newspapers have already ceased publication—either closing completely or moving to an online-only publishing model—and the rest are in some difficulty. A decline in advertising, worldwide, is projected for the year. Book sales in the US are declining some, but in genre not as much, for the moment. Let all that rest for now.

We have been nominated for the Hugo Award once again, our twenty-first nomination, and although we do not anticipate winning, we are pleased and proud to be nominated. We encourage everyone in our readership to attend the World SF Convention in Montreal this August, and to vote for the Hugos, and to attend the business meeting at 10 a.m. on Saturday where the final vote will be held on whether the Best Semiprozine Hugo award will be abolished. We are opposed to that abolition for several reasons: we cannot honorably compete in any other category; we derive great personal satisfaction from our nominations; and most of our competitors in the category feel the same way. The Semiprozine Hugo is one of the Hugo awards that actually supports the essential infrastructure underpinning the worldwide argument that is the science fiction field, that continues the discourse of who we think we are and what we think we are doing. So it is vote or be disenfranchised. See <www.semiprozine.org> for an extended discussion of the issues involved.

Meanwhile: Yay! We’re a Hugo nominee!

We attended ICFA in Orlando in March, and Ad Astra in Toronto at the start of April, and have pictures of both on page 3. We are still offering packages of back issues, our choice, 40 for $20 or 80 for $40, and so on up to 200 for $100, to subscribers. And our experiment with offering electronic copies to foreign subscribers, to reduce their postage to zero, has had some small success. Most subscribers still want the hard copy for the full price, though. But the offer still stands; enquire at the addresses on page 3 for more info. Postage is going up too far and too fast for at least our comfort. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

First the Flood, Then the Drought

From NYRSF ISSUE #248, April 2009

Today, the Sunday morning of the March work weekend, a water main broke and flooded Laurel Lane, just down the street. And so we are without water for the moment. Here is a picture of our water going away:

On February 16, Anderson News, the distribution company that controlled about 25% of the mass market and magazine in the U.S., closed, after failing to impose a distribution surcharge on the magazine publishing industry as of February 1. Anderson covered, for instance, much of Wal-Mart. Their delivery assets (trucks and such) have been sold to a competitor, News Group. A third distributor, Source Interlink, who account for another 25% of U.S. wholesale distribution, is suing the magazine publishers in order to stay in business for the moment. It appears that both magazine publishers and paperback book publishers are going to lose both money owed to them and distribution immediately. Bad news indeed in a time filled with economic difficulties. 

SFWA has announced a radical change in the rules and procedures for their Nebula and other awards, replacing the widely criticized practices (see for instance the article by John Clute in NYRSF #131) that have been accumulating around their awards since the 1970s, resulting in their awards having no commercial credibility or value and too little aesthetic basis or grounding as well. We applaud the changes and hope they are not too little, too late.

On page three you will see pictures from Boskone and from the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in early February. We’ll have a piece on the TOC Conference and more pictures in the next issue, but our intrepid reporter, Kathryn Cramer, left the conference with a virus that then kept her from attending Boskone, and the following weekend suffered an auto accident that resulted in a displaced vertebra in her neck, so the report is yet to be written.

This has been a long and stress-filled winter, with two minor operations, many colds, and one job loss within the core staff of NYRSF. We are grateful for the continued support of our readers and subscribers and hope for the immediate restoration of our water supply before another major snowstorm hits tonight. We look forward to warmer weather, in its time.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

And now the news

From NYRSF ISSUE #247, March 2009

I refer of course to the classic sf story by Theodore Sturgeon. Any of you who do not see its relevance to the present state of the world and sf need to go back and read it soon. It is an idea of Robert A. Heinlein’s, set to the musical language of Sturgeon, and at the center of the question of prolepsis in sf.

It is now a plausible scenario that all the professional printed sf magazines in the U.S. will cease publication this year—along with many other magazines. The circulation figures for sf publications as printed in the Locus summary show dire progressions downward for all magazines in 2008—and Realms of Fantasy will cease publication as of April 2009. As I write, there are conflicting reports that fifty percent of the magazine distribution in the US is about to cease business—some reports say it has in fact happened, some deny it. What is certain is that there is a per-copy surcharge just levied on all magazines by two huge distributors, and that some big magazines, such as Time and People, are refusing to pay it. What is also uncertain is how this will affect the distribution of mass market books in the US—mass market books are distributed to non-bookstore locations by magazine distributors, who put the books into airports, supermarkets, and Wal-Mart stores, for instance. But these are only five percent of the distributors’ business. The Trumps of Doom interpretation for sf is that it will bring about a short-term cascade of returns on all titles from the distributors, and then decrease the already decreasing distribution of all sf and fantasy, forcing nearly all smaller books into unprofitability. The end result of that scenario would be a sharp, sudden decrease in the number of mass-market paperback titles published by the end of 2009 and a concomitant increase in pressure to publish more titles in trade paperback. I don’t even want to speculate at this point on what it might mean for electronic publication, which is just beginning to show some noticeable profitability. Let us consider this all a dystopian sf scenario for the moment, and we will report back next month.

I had hoped to devote this editorial entirely to John Updike, but a condensed version will have to do. Updike was one of the principal arbiters of literary taste in the U.S., a writer of extraordinary talent, and, like Edmund Wilson, a fine book reviewer, principally for The New Yorker. Like W. H. Auden in the generation before him, he was interested in science as well as literature, and Updike was the single most influential force in establishing the literary acceptability of Ursula K. Le Guin in the mainstream in the US. He uttered an authoritative marginalization of science fiction as a whole in his New Yorker review of my own A World Treasury of Science Fiction—in part authoritative because it came from a selective sympathizer. He set up his discussion with what he called the crucial question: “What keeps science fiction a minor genre, for all the brilliance of its authors and apparent pertinence of its concerns?” His answer I always found unsatisfactory: “Each science fiction story is so busy inventing its environment that little energy is invested in the human subtleties.” My short version response is that this is fairly clearly a restatement of the Modernist position that good literature is solely about the inner life of characters in ordinary situations. Science fiction is general does not attempt that but excels at the behavior of characters in unusual and at best entirely plausible invented settings. I invite our readers to comment.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

Slow Progress, Fast Times, II

From ISSUE #246, February 2009

No one is yet privy to all the information shaking the industry; all we know are fragments, puzzle pieces, and snapshots. Among these: Doubleday and Bantam are no longer publishers, and some imprints and some employees of other publishers are gone, too. Gordon Van Gelder has announced that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is now bi-monthly, not monthly. It is rumored that other magazines are for sale. Some editors are promoted, some are out of work. If any company in sf publishing met or exceeded sales expectations in the second half of 2008, we are not aware of it. No one is bailing out publishers. What everyone knows is that this is near the start, not near the end, of all the changes. 

One sign of the times for us is that after Year’s Best Fantasy #8 received the most enthusiastic reception so far for a volume of YBF, sales decreased in bookstores; and in a surprising development, we got a contract to continue the book via Tor.com as their first book. Year’s Best Fantasy #9 will be primarily an electronic publication, but physical copies are planned under the  Tor.com brand—Tor.com is associated with Tor Books but is not an imprint of Tor. 

Another signpost is that we have gotten thus far only enthusiasm from our non-US subscribers for our PDF project, which begins with this issue.

Once again at this time of year, a snowstorm has impeded but not prevented the NYRSF work weekend. And that comes a mere three days after an ice storm that knocked over one hundred-foot high tree in our back yard and caused another to split and lean. Ah, winter.

Kathryn and I are finishing this month as usual the Year’s Best SF and the Year’s Best Fantasy, so we can make some comments on the short fiction of 2008. In our opinion, it was an especially good year for science fiction and only a decent year for short fantasy. There were a bunch of really good anthologies of original fiction in the US and UK. Australia and Canada each produced high spots (Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again and Claude Lalumière’s Tesseracts 12). What was particularly noticeable to us was that these days Peter S. Beagle is a one-person fantasy renaissance in short fiction. Other high points include Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s first collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, possibly the two most important first books our field in 2008. We should probably single out Subterranean and PS as particularly distinguished small presses this year, with Night Shade and Small Beer of equal quality to them, though with fewer titles. Three cool original anthologies from the UK you might otherwise miss are Celebrations, Myth-Understandings, and Subterfuge, all edited by Ian Whates under the Newcon imprint, and all containing interesting selections of fantasy & sf. Among the magazines, F& SF had a particularly good year, Interzone got darker, Asimov’s and Analog got smaller (fewer pages per issue by the end of the year), and Postscripts bigger, morphing into an anthology series. In the aether (online), Helix ceased publication, Subterranean switched from print to electronic, Strange Horizons persisted, Lone Star Fiction and Flurb continued and improved.

A lighter than usual travel schedule ahead: I am headed to Boskone in February and then the ICFA in March. Much of the NYRSF staff will be at one, or the other, or both as well; see you there! 

—David G. Hartwell

& the Editors

Slow Progress, Fast Times

From NYRSF ISSUE #245, January 2009

Well, the world rolls on, and not entirely downhill. Thanks to all of you who have recently renewed your subscriptions; and for those of you who have not, please do. We have decided to cut back our print run, after nearly a decade of unfounded optimism that the store market would perhaps recover and that our subscription level would increase. Instead, our subscription level has stayed rock steady at the same level and our increase in bookstore distribution totals three copies monthly. And so we have decided to stock fewer copies of our back issues.

And after working frankly too slowly on this for months, we are about to launch electronic subscriptions for our Canadian and overseas subscribers, who are being forced to pay a huge premium in postage for hard copies. If you live outside the US and want to participate in this new service, for which we will charge the same rate as a domestic US subscription, please email us and tell us so, at <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> and we will respond. We are particularly interested in updating our database of international email addresses, which is woefully incomplete.

Our plan is to fulfill current subscriptions with both physical copies and electronic at the current rate. After that, we will offer renewals and new subscribers either an electronic subscription, or a combined electronic and physical subscription at the higher rate to cover postage. If you are paying via SFRA or IAFA, we will figure out how to make a transition.

We are establishing a password-protected FTP site, on which we will place a PDF copy each month for a period of time. We will email the password to subscribers on the day of release and the issue will remain available at the site until the next issue is published. We are, admittedly, concerned that unlimited circulation of the PDF (either electronically or via multiple printed copies) will reduce our paid circulation, but we hope that will be balanced by the number of subscribers we will gain from making this lower-cost option available. If our subscription base drops significantly, we will fall below the break-even point and will be forced to reconsider the program. 

As a side benefit, we are establishing a PayPal account linked to the email address above, to receive electronic payments from all subscribers (electronic or paper). We hope it will be active by the time you read these words.

One benefit of these changes in the long run is that we will potentially be able to post back issues for free when we run through our supply of physical copies, probably within a year of publication. Sad to say, we lack electronic files for many of our early issues, and currently have insufficient volunteer time, equipment, and software to create such files. But maybe someday.

So as 2009 begins, there are hopeful signs of progress on our end. We wish you a year of happy reading.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

The Winter of Hope and Discomfort

From NYRSF ISSUE #244, December 2008

There has not been a lots of good economic news in the world since our last editorial, but the political landscape is somewhat altered, and the heads of states seem to be taking the economic crisis seriously. And there is a large amount of what we hope is temporary pain and discomfort. In the microcosm of NYRSF, our economic situation is a bit improved, since some of you really did order back issue and renew your lapsed subscriptions.  Not enough of you for comfort, but enough to keep us only on the brink of printing delays for the present month or two, but not delayed. We still can’t afford to upgrade our software or equipment.

     And we know we are not alone. Anecdotes from other publishers, both book and magazines, and from book dealers large and small, seem to indicate that a crisis of some sort is being delayed, but not yet avoided.  The big commercial publishers are pale with anxiety over the possible demise of the Borders bookstore chain. Lots of ordinary people have lost lots of money in their pension plans and investments and savings, and some of them their jobs as well. It is a bad time to be a freelancer just now. We don’t know anyone who isn’t cutting expenses, even if only just in case. Volunteer labor is scarce.

     But to judge from the three conventions we attended in the last month, the SF community is not in too bad shape. The community does not seem to be in denial, but fairly well in touch with the problems, and being carefully abstemious, yet not just staying home. At Capclave and Albacon, there was general happiness among the fans, and although the first was a bit smaller than usual, and the other a bit larger, the halls and program rooms were generally filled with energetic discussion. I was particularly impressed that Capclave showed such unusual good taste and careful planning in giving Michael Dirda and James Morrow, the guests of honor,  each an appropriate painting commissioned from a talented local artist of professional quality. And I felt that Tod McCaffery, filling in as Albacon GOH alone when his mother could not attend, was gracious, hard-working, and enthusiastic.

The World Fantasy Convention in Calgary was as good as usual, which means very good indeed, and had a distinctly Canadian air, as was appropriate. We couldn’t get into the hotel a day early, and so drove to Banff and stayed across the street from the public hot springs in a Spa Hotel offering discounts, which made it cheaper than the con hotel in Calgary. Frankly, though, we anticipate less travel in 2009 than in 2008. Our next con is Boskone in February.

Do remember to renew your subscription if you are set to expire in the next couple of months. It looks as if we are all going to be short of money in the near term. And  we close with a sincere wish for a happy holiday season.

David G. Hartwell

& the Editors

And Then It Was the Economy: Dance Band on the Titanic?

From NYRSF ISSUE #243, November 2008

The trillions of dollars in the process of vanishing in the U.S. economy alone make our own economic stress seem miniscule, but it is stress nevertheless. We are down about forty subscribers. And while that is not a make or break number for profitability, it makes our expense cushion vanish. And it raises the spectre of profitability. We have never in twenty years published an issue without having the money in the bank to pay the printing bill. We don’t plan to violate that practice in the future. But the possibility of a delayed issue sometime this winter is real, for the first time in more than a decade. What we do in the face of a real delay is drop everything else and solicit more renewals from lapsed subscribers. Twenty renewals will do the trick—not a huge number, but as I said above, all our numbers are small.

It has occurred to us that if our numbers are a bit down, perhaps the numbers elsewhere are down, while costs continue to rise. I looked at the latest issue of Asimov’s and it seemed thinner. Didn’t it used to have more pages recently? I suppose that if the dreadful scenario involving international economics we have been told to fear, without much explanation, in the last two weeks (at the moment I write this) is accurate, there will be great changes everywhere, and very soon. The world of the future might look very different in six months, or even right after Christmas. My father, an engineer and graduate of MIT, was fired on Christmas Eve one year in the 1930s. My family has always remembered that.

But right now, we can pay our next bill, and we are going to Albacon, Capclave, and the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, Alberta before I write the next editorial. We intend to have a good time, sell subscriptions, and emphasize how much fun it is to have a science fiction and fantasy community, internationally, to gather with and argue about what constitutes the field today.

We are still, let me say, having fun here at NYRSF galactic central. We even had a reading about a month ago to celebrate our twentieth anniversary (see pix on page 23) that turned out to be not only entertaining but often quite funny. Gordon Van Gelder, David G. Hartwell, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Kevin J. Maroney read, and several ex-staffers were in the audience too. 

As part of the fund-raising activity, I would like to remind you, in closing, that we are selling down our oversupply of back issues, and will still sell you 100 copies for $50.00 or 40 copies for $20.00 (each issue different, our choice). Send a check to Dragon Press if you are interested. We can’t let you choose issues, since we are really nearly out of a bunch of them, but in other cases we have nearly 200 copies, and that is too many to store much longer.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

Hurricane Season

From NYRSF ISSUE #242 October 2008

Once again it is September, and we have produced this issue during the rains and wind of Hurricane Hanna (well, Tropical Storm Hanna, now). Most of the staff had to stay home, but we persevered and triumphed over adversity, as usual. For those of you who have been following our editorials about our computers for years, this is another of those moments. The adversity was not the storm, but the failure of the logic board on Singularity, Kathryn’s Mac G5, early in the week, requiring the sudden purchase of a new machine. (“Oh, those boards fail in four years or so on those G5s,” said Tekserve.) The as-yet unnamed machine performed admirably well for layout, and Singularity should be up and running as the NYRSF production computer next month.

At Denvention, which I attended without family (though most of the NYRSF Weekly Meeting staff were present), we once again lost the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine to Locus. I then discovered that a rules change passed that, if ratified at the Worldcon business meeting next year in Montreal, will eliminate the Best Semiprozine category. This would prevent us from being eligible for a Hugo again unless we were to make a couple of changes to declare ourselves a fanzine. We would rather not do that; we are great admirers of the traditional fanzines, but we do not consider ourselves as within that tradition. We think that the hybrid category we currently inhabit is valuable. It seems to us that the elimination of the category is the result of fatigue on the part of people who care about the Worldcon and Hugos with giving the award to Locus so many times. Rather than face this directly, by say limiting the number of consecutive awards that can be won in this category to two, or three—or in fact no consecutive awards in this category (which is what for instance the World Fantasy Awards do with several categories), or limiting the number of awards that any publication can win to three, ever, or in twenty years, or something fairly reasonable—the particular smofs assembled apparently just decided to punt. I suppose I should recommend attending the business meeting at Anticipation next August, if you care about this. I’ll be there.

Meanwhile, I did win a Hugo Award myself for Best Editor (Long Form), and there’s a picture of it wearing my tie and jacket on page 23.

Aside from Denvention, Kathryn and I went to Montreal over Labor Day weekend to Farthing Party (see picture on page 23). This is charming small con, chaired by Jo Walton, with two full days of generally excellent programming and intense discussion. I was particularly pleased to have no real problems at the border, since I left my luggage and passport home in the rush to depart—I was lucky to be traveling with my wife and children. We like Canada.

This week we are having our twentieth anniversary reading in NYC and are proceeding to move on in our twenty-first year. We are looking forward to strange times. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

Forward

From NYRSF ISSUE #241, September 2008

And so we begin our twenty-first year of publication, a mature magazine. We have twenty Hugo Award nominations—one for every year so far—for which we are enormously grateful. We were the subject of a panel at Readercon on how we have changed over the years—the conclusion being, “Not much!”, because, by our editorial principles and desires, we more or less got it right at the start and have continued to get it right. But rather than continue this back-patting, I will direct you to the photo spread on pages 22–23 of this issue for a look at our anniversary party in July, and then digress.

I attended my first sf convention in 1963, Discon, having been unable to attend the Pittsburgh and Chicago conventions just prior. When I was interviewing Joe Haldeman as Guest of Honor at Confluence in Pittsburgh, I asked in the course of the discussion about his first convention, and it turned out that Joe and Gay as teenagers had attended Discon and even entered the masquerade (as Rhysling, Heinlein’s blind poet, and a lady from the Anti-Sex League in Nineteen Eighty-Four, respectively). I had just graduated college and was alone that evening, so I sat at a round table with an older gentleman for two hours and talked about myself and about sf while the masquerade and dance went on. Les Gerber, a New York fan, was dressed as Terry Carr in a sort of zoot suit. John and Joni Stopa were mostly undressed as Incubus and Succubus, for which they won first prize. 

The gentleman I was talking to was Harry Warner, and when I told Paul Williams and my other fan acquaintances, they didn’t at first believe me. I was relatively new to fandom and did not know until their astonishment and disbelief that I had spent an evening with the hermit of Hagerstown, whom none of them had met. I had earlier that day been introduced to Walter Breen, so I looked up his Fanac report on the convention years later. It turned out that young Bill Gibson was in that masquerade as a priest of the beetle god. It was his first convention, too. And Mike Resnick’s. I am off to Denver in the hope that it will be as important an experience for others as Discon was for us.

We love bibliography and annotated lists and don’t get enough to publish. So we are particularly pleased to have the checklist of Greeks in sf in this issue. Without it, for instance, it would never have occurred to me that Mark Clifton’s collaborator, Alex Apostolides, was the brother of Philip K. Dick’s second wife, Kleo (and that they were married at the time Clifton won the Hugo). I wonder what all the social connections were. In any case, see what surprising information you can find in the list. And if you are a list maker, send us yours. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

Why We Fight, or, Someone Gets Us!

From NYRSF ISSUE #240, August 2008

As we were preparing this, our Twentieth Anniversary issue, we received the following letter. The flattery in it turns our modest little heads; but even more than that, if we had set out to write a summary of what we hope to accomplish in publishing this magazine, we could not have done better than Dr. Gannon does. As such, we will let it stand as our statement as we celebrate the arrival of our third decade.

—David G. Hartwell, Kevin J. Maroney, 

and the eds.

Charles E. Gannon, St. Bonaventure, New York

Just a week before Balticon, I found myself laid low by a bout with bronchitis. Dismal, but it provided me a long-overdue excuse to get to my back-reading—some of which has been languishing on my shelf for four or even five years. But despite using every moment of illness and then recuperation to achieve this end, I failed. The fault was not mine: it was NYRSF’s. Why? Because it was too damned interesting to speed-read.

There’s something about reading several years of a periodical’s or journal’s publication all at once which imparts an intense (as if distilled) appreciation of its broader content and significance. So although I did not come away from this condensed reading experience with any new sense re: the excellence of the individual articles (they are almost always superb), I did discover that I had obtained a macrospective view of NYRSF that was both far stronger and nuanced than any which I had enjoyed before. In the first place, it was a delight to find myself quickly caught up in the crests and swells of five years of flowing and learned (as distinct from “academic”) discussion of sf/f literature. Having recently withdrawn from full-time tenured classroom work (and the often fustian and highly mannered scholarship which such a career makes advisable, even obligatory), this was not only a singular treat but a great reassurance: you have succeeded in your evident quest to keep sf scholarship from becoming solely an academic enterprise. In my (limited) knowledge of literary studies, I can think of no other publication which functions so successfully as a generally accessible forum for, and record of, the evolution of any field or genre of literature. And it is worth adding that the fashion in which it achieves this is even more remarkable and unprecedented: open to all opinions, and all contributors, it nonetheless has created its own oeuvre, which might best be described (paradoxically) as laid-back belles-lettres. Over the course of two days, I found dueling opinions on the social impact of sf, of the (un?)likelihood of the Vingian singularity, of “mundane sf,” of the “true” meaning of “space opera.” And yet, despite the many theoretical thrusts, ripostes, and parodic feints, NYRSF never devolved into the terse and bitter range wars that can dominate academic criticism, nor veered into the trackless chaos of rants, flames, and personal denunciations of the blogosphere. In a world where arguments and issues seem to become increasingly polarized, and debaters have become almost reflexively hostile and quick to snatch up the saw-toothed flechettes of ad hominem attacks, NYRSF remains a bastion of not only learned, but civilized discussion.

One final observation: it is rare that any literary field leaves a chronicle of its own evolution—of how the matrixed variables of changing market realities, cultural sensibilities, personal careers, and reclaimed manuscripts (and much more) blend together to shape its ever-changing identity. Thanks to NYRSF, sf/fantasy/speculative fiction (insert your own term here) possesses such a chronicle, and more. For whereas a chronicle is but a collection of events, arranged in their order of occurrence, NYRSF in toto is a history built in part from learned observation, and in part from the reports of individuals who have worked within the field. This is not to say that, read in its entirety, NYRSF offers an “objective depiction” of the field: not only do I doubt that there is such a thing as a truly “objective depiction,” I consider it as oxymoronic a concept as one is likely to encounter. However, in both its breadth and depth of view, and in the profound catholicity of its editorial vision, the NYRSF is as fine a resource and a record as any one could hope for in any field of literary study—whether academic or not.

Hmmm: I guess I’ll renew my subscription after all.