The New York Review of Science Fiction

February 2012 Editorial

Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

 

    The title of this editorial is borrowed from a Marilyn Hacker

sonnet sequence, referring to an older comment that all poetry is

about love, death, and the changing of the seasons. Award season

is upon us, too. We are still eligible for the Hugo Award as Best

Semiprozine, and we hope that you nominate us and vote for us.

It has taken a few years to recenter and recast that Hugo category,

and it is now sort of settled down, pending a confirming vote at

Worldcon this August, and we’re happy to be part of it.

    As I write in January 2012, the December issue of NYRSF has

not yet been mailed to subscribers from our new printer, though

they promise to finish the January issue and mail it “in a couple of

weeks.” It is our sincere hope that you will receive this February

issue before the end of February. The whole back-story is recounted

in the December editorial, which we hope you will have read before

you are reading this one (it’s available at <www.nyrsf.com>).

    You will note that we have new subscription terms as of the

January issue (see page three of this issue for the full info). We will

include them in our renewal letters too. This is going to be a hard

year, and we will survive it only substantially transformed.

    And now, news of fresh disasters, if I may be unabashedly

hyperbolic: the Monday after the last work weekend, we discovered

that the company that owns the storage facility where the NYRSF

back issues have been stored for 15 or more years was closing that

facility at the end of December, 2011, and so we had to vacate. Jen

Gunnels is the hero of this story. She spent five half-days the next

week with me, sorting and recycling thousands of back issues. Those

issues are a part of us, and we hate to lose them rather than put them

before the eyes of avid readers. We had been moving slowly for two

years on this, but now we are a downhill freight train.

    We are keeping a small supply in Westport, and a slightly larger

supply in Pleasantville temporarily, to fill orders this year. We

are still sorting the cartons in Pleasantville that were not in the

locker and recycling more. In the event you want back issues, let

us know now and we’ll make you a deal. Of course our standard

offer of 40 issues for $20 and 80 for $40 (our choice) stands. But

if you want to choose your issues, you’d better consider doing so

soon. (A full index of the magazine is available in Excel format

at bit.ly.x5KnYc.)

    We believe we have complete files available, but now less

than 50 copies of many issues. Some of the issues will not last.

In the end, we hope to scan our early issues and preserve them

for sale in PDF format.

—David G. Hartwell

& the Editors

 

January 2012 Editorial

Note: This editorial contains important information for subscribers.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

    We are at a moment of decision in the publishing of NYRSF, and here is what we see in our future: We will continue to publish print issues through the end of the current volume in July 2012. It does not appear that we will continue in print past then but will switch to PDFs of entire issues. These may be emailed to subscribers, or we may decide not to have subscribers and just make each issue available online, either for a nominal charge or for free. We will almost certainly also offer a print-on-demand option as well.

    What has brought us to this moment is that our long-time printer, Odyssey Press, was sold in October, after we had sent the November issue to them. Odyssey did not print it, because by the time it was prepared they had run entirely out of paper, and so they sent the job to the new owner in Pennsylvania. They did ultimately print it, late in November, but did not mail it until December 2. Thus we missed a calendar month for the first time in our 23-year history. We have only now received our first printing bill from them and have sent our December issue to them today, two weeks late, because we were not confident that they could remain our printer until they actually printed and mailed an issue at the agreed price. It has been an anxious six weeks. We do not know how it will play out over the coming months.

    Many of you know that we have offered a PDF subscription to overseas and non-US subscribers for the last couple of years, but we are now, this minute, offering this option to all subscribers. If it is time for you to renew your subscription, we want you to know that you can switch immediately to all-electronic for the reduced price of $3.00/issue. We recommend it to you as the best option, since the process is already in place. And that price is good worldwide.

    For now, we are not accepting subscriptions past July until we have decided on our future course. For those of you who have recently renewed, contact us directly about subscription extension and conversion to PDF if you wish to convert now. A year from now we may well not be offering a print option. 

—David G. Hartwell, Kevin J. Maroney,

& the editors

 

December 2011 Editorial

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

    As we sent the last issue, 279, to our printer, intending for it to ship as usual within the month of publication, we were suddenly informed that our printer had been sold to a larger outfit in Pennsylvania and was closing down its New Hampshire facilities at the end of October. Then one of their machines broke, delaying the issue another week, into very late October. Then they ran out of paper (since they were closing, they could order no more) and had to send the issue to Pennsylvania to print and ship. The end of the story is that it shipped in early November from Pennsylvania. We hope you have it—we haven’t seen it yet, as I write in mid-November. Obviously we were being prevented from easy communication with our old rep during October, who we can gather was leaving the company somewhat abruptly. This issue, 280, is the first one printed and shipped entirely from the new operation in Pennsylvania, and we hope for a return to smooth operation and a happier experience all the way around. Even though we are late.

    The World Fantasy Convention in San Diego and Capclave in Maryland happened in October, and Albacon did not, so pictures this time (pages 3 and 23) are all from World Fantasy, plus one from a visit to Cindy Lee Berryhill and Alexander Berryhill Williams before the convention started.

    The publishing industry continues its grinding changes month by month, and Amazon keeps many buyers happy and enthusiastic by continuing to sell (or lend) things to read below cost. Just as the Great Recession is moving the middle class lower, leaving only the wealthy rising, so publishing is depressing the midlist and cutting from the bottom of the list, in an attempt to leave only the most successful. Publishing is also trying very hard to release ebooks, as many and as fast as possible, to take advantage of the device-driven sales that ought to take place before and after the Christmas holidays, as well as when any new of updated device is marketed. It remains to be seen whether the average published writer will benefit significantly in terms of income. Than again, the whole world economy is readjusting in significant and mostly unpredictable ways in the winter of 2011–12.

    Dragon Press is still attempting to weather the economic storms by selling our back issues inexpensively in bulk (see prior editorials, or email us and ask). And by encouraging you to renew your subscriptions. Climate change is giving us some challenges, not the least the unexpected foot of snow here on Halloween weekend. But most of all, the challenge of putting out more issues is very real. We are discussing various electronic strategies for promotion and publication, and we encourage you to take a look at, and tell your friends about, the newly updated <www.nyrsf.com>. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

 

November 2011 Editorial

   Waking the Dragon

    With the changing of the seasons, Dragon Press has escalated to a new level of activity at our Westport, New York bookstore. During the summer we opened every weekend, and during the fall, not only are we open weekends, but we have launched our events program, planned to be an ongoing series. See <www.dragonpress.com> for news and schedules as we develop the programs. During October, and already past by the time you read this, we began on Columbus Day weekend with readings and discussions with Michael Swanwick, Jeanne Beckwith, and F. Brett Cox.

The event had a very packed schedule:

Saturday Oct 8:

2 p.m.: Reception/meet the authors Michael Swanwick, Jeanne Beckwith, and F. Brett Cox, including a short but fascinating dramatic presentation of Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust

3 p.m.: Introduction and Michael Swanwick reading

4 p.m.: Discussion with Brett Cox, Kathryn Cramer, Michael Swanwick

8 p.m.: Reception in honor of out of town guests (this means you)

Sunday October 9:

1 p.m.: Discussion with Michael Swanwick and David G. Hartwell, followed by Michael Swanwick signing

2 p.m.: Jeanne Beckwith reading from her prize-winning play Opportunity of a Lifetime (see Act I in this issue)

3 p.m.: F. Brett Cox reading

4 p.m.: Reception with authors

    On the same weekend, at the height of fall foliage in the Adirondacks, the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks sponsored the Boquet Valley Studio Tour (made possible, in part, with a Developing Community Arts Grant with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program) Friday through Sunday, in which local artists opened their studios to visitors. You might still want to come up for the next event, or the one after.

    If you decide to come up for a future event, by car or Amtrack, the directions and local contacts are listed on our Web site. And we will even throw a party. We will have events that are not directly related to sf and fantasy, sometimes tied into the local cultural scene in Essex County.

    We traveled to Montreal in mid-September for Jo Walton’s Farthing Party (see pictures on page three). And the next week I paid an overdue visit to Arrowhead, home of the Virginia Kidd Agency (and formerly home of James Blish and Virginia Kidd and their family) in legendary Milford, Pennsylvania, recently reopened after the floods from Hurricane Claire. The picture here is of the living room/office, with agent Vaughne Hansen. *

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

 

October 2011 Editorial

In the Storm 

    One of the best things about the last month is that there was no substantial damage to either of our headquarters in Westport and Pleasantville New York from the very real hurricanes that hit hard in this area. Lots of nearby flooding, lots of nearby power losses, road closings, many, many trees down. But we are relatively unscathed. Another best thing was the Worldcon in Reno, at which I took a large number of photos, some of which are on pages 3 and 20–23. In Reno, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden and I got to visit our friend and former NYRSF writer Susan Palwick and her husband Gary at their home. 

    One of the worst things was the number of people who got sick or even died. Bill Trojan passed away in his hotel room at Reno, Bill Patterson became ill and had to have an amputation just after the convention, Lee Modesitt’s wife Carolanne became ill on the first day and required surgery the next week, still in Reno. And Bella Pagan, the new editor at Tor UK, had an ailment that put her in the same elevator as Lee Modesitt very late at night in the con hotel, coming back heavily medicated from the same local emergency room. 

    Bracketing Reno, I had a fine time as GoH at Diversicon in St. Paul, before, and at Context in sunny Columbus, Ohio the week after (while Hurricane Irene was closing roads for my return trip). But I sure felt like I needed my week of vacation in Westport after that. 

    With all that travel, this issue is being produced a week late, while I am recovering from a week of emergency dental work and then four yellow jacket stings while mowing my lawn and trying to catch up on editing and other work. And the next issue will have to be produced two weeks from now to get us back on schedule. Fortunately we had a helpful visit from our former Managing Editor, Ariel Haméon, and a new volunteer staffer, Heather Masri, to help us over the hump this weekend. And Jen Gunnels brought wasp spray.

    Also at Reno the amended rules for the Semiprozine Hugo were adopted, so the Hugo category in which we are eligible persists. Maybe next year we will be nominated again. The new rules will have to be ratified by vote at the Business Meeting of the Chicago Worldcon next August, but we hope for the best. We welcome your continued support and participation.

—David G. Hartwell & the editors. 

September 2011 Editorial

Winds of Change in Our Twenty-Fourth Year

 

    By the time you read this, the Hugo Award rules defining

the categories of fanzine and semiprozine (and, by implication,

prozine) may well have changed. After two years of fairly

contentious discussion, there is a recommendation being put

forth at the business meeting of the Worldcon in Reno (under

two weeks from when I write) that will probably pass in some

form. It is our sincere hope that our loyal readers will continue

to nominate us in the coming years.

    This issue begins our 24th year of publication and during

that time a number of astonishing changes have taken place in

the sf field. Arguably the most amazing, but not to us the most

thrilling, is the disappearance of awards devoted specifically

to science fiction, along with the gradually accelerating

redefinition of sf as primarily a film and television phenomenon

that is also published in books, too. The last purely science

fiction award left in the U.S. is the Philip K. Dick Award—all

the rest are for horror, or fantasy, or sf including horror and

fantasy. This is the world of 1988, when we first appeared,

turned nearly upside down. In that world, there was a series of

awards for fantasy and horror, most of them obscure except for

the World Fantasy Award, and a sizable number of science fiction

awards that occasionally had fantasy works nominated and win.

It is not occasionally but regularly now. Ten years before that, in

1978, there were no horror awards, and only the WFA and the

British Fantasy Awards covering all works of speculative fiction

outside of science fiction. I speak as a founder of the WFA: we

had to consider two years of published work in 1975 to have a

sufficient repository of fiction to make up a full ballot, and still

only found three novels to nominate.

    The other astonishment is the extent to which the

electronic media has made consumers out of writers in the last

few years. We like and respect the small press, but it is not the

small press we are talking about. The number of titles offered

for sale (we do not use the word “published” except for books—

including ebooks—processed through the various filters of a

publisher and offered for sale with the support of marketing—

as opposed to no marketing—to the entire constellation of

distribution, not merely one channel) has radically increased

to half the total of all books published in a year, fiction and

nonfiction.

    This is a very old game, preying on the desires of

unpublished writers for the external validation of publication—

preying on the identity as a writer that is conferred by a

physical or electronic book with your name on it. In this new

world, anyone can pay to be published and loudly maintain

equality with writers who were paid to license their works for

publication—if you include printed in one or more copies by

a professional printer that offers publishing services for pay, or

converted to an electronic platform and listed on the Internet.

We receive daily communications now from hired publicists

or directly from writers requesting review attention, which we

decline (and a very few we accept) because nearly all of these

works have been neither edited nor proofread. The writers pay,

in hope of making a profit on sales—and some do. The best

thing we can say about it is that not all of the books are bad. It

is not a service to readers that we see, but servicing of people

who write and want to be called writers.

    I will continue to discuss changes in future editorials.

Meanwhile, our calls for more volunteer labor have fallen on

deaf ears in this last year, and attrition has reduced our staff.

It is getting harder to produce issues up to our high standards.

Also, it is getting harder to retain subscribers in this hard

economy. We have not raised our cover price in years, but with

this issue it goes up to $5.00. We edit and print about 22,000

words of content per issue, and actually sell very few individual

issues, but do need small increments of gain in income to

continue. In January we will increase our subscription rate,

again for the first time in a number of years. And we really

want to move our old back issues out of paid storage, so for

two months or so, starting now, we will give subscribers twenty

to fifty back issues from our first decade for a dollar each, our

choice. After that we will gradually recycle most of the leftovers.

If you have only been subscribing since 1998 and missed that

fertile decade, this is your chance to score.

 

—David G. Hartwell

 

August 2011 Editorial

Two Days Off

    Right after Kevin Maroney and I finished laying out this issue

in a rare mid-week Work Weekend Session, I took two days off

with friends and family, the first to attend the Pleasantville Music

Festival and the next to have my seventieth birthday party. Those

of you who attend Readercon know that there is often a birthday

cake for me on opening night. The reason for that tradition is that

in the 1980s, when Readercon moved to the weekend nearest July

10, it moved into conflict with my annual birthday party, to which

I usually had fifty or so of my friends, many from the sf community.

Readercon wanted those fifty friends, and me, to attend Readercon

instead, so they made me an offer I did not want to refuse: a

birthday celebration. Readercon has on rare occasions moved to a

different weekend, and when it did so this year, I decided to have

my party again.

    This time, I was able to have several people come a day early

and stay over, to see my son Geoff and his band at the festival the

day before. Geoff’s band played twice on Saturday, and in between

Geoff got to jam onstage with his friend Sonny Landreth. In Geoff’s

first set, his band was joined by Andy Aledort (formerly of Dicky

Betts’s band) and my favorite piece was a really smokin’ version of

Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline.” Then the party on Sunday: Dr. Jen

Gunnels (who does our theater reviews) is also a professional belly

dancer and agreed to dance—which she did, quite spectacularly.

Many friends came by, and some stayed later than I could last, but I

sure had fun. I do regret all the old friends who couldn’t make it.

—David G. Hartwell

and the editors

 

 

June 2011 Editorial

Winds of Change

    Well, Lake Champlain is flooding in upstate New York, and

we are happy that the Dragon Press headquarters in Westport is

on a bluff. The publishing industry is suddenly suffering from a

cutback in mass market orders in the last month, not entirely the

result of the fall of Borders, and not exactly the result of increased

ebook sales. It appears that the major distribution channels decided

in near-unison to decrease their initial orders on paperbacks to

cover a four-week supply rather than a six-week supply, or to buy to

net—which means if the last book by an author sold 40,000 copies

out of 80,000 distributed, this time the stores only buy 40,000;

and sometime both happen at once, so that if, of those 40,000

sold, only 30,000 sold in the first four weeks, they’re buying only

30,000 this time. You can see that this would seriously diminish

the initial print run on every title. All the numbers I have used are

theoretical, but they show the forces at play. This kind of group

decision steamroller happens from time to time in publishing, and

it is never pleasant.

    And what happens if the last sale was only 15,000 copies?

Well, then the title falls below the baseline profitability necessary

to publish it at all on first release, and the publisher has to cancel

the mass market edition, choose to publish it at a loss, or gamble

that there will be good sales and a nearly immediate reprint that

will carry the book up to profitability soon. But the economies of

scale that used to apply to mass print runs, lowering the unit cost

per book, dwindle even further than they already have in the last

decade. It is hard to imagine, then, that the same number of mass

market paperbacks will be published this month in 2012 as are

released this month in 2011. Everyone gets hurt in the pocketbook:

writers, publishers, distributors, booksellers. The only question is

who gets hurt least, and that’s not an easy answer now, though it

will be perfectly clear later.

    What is clear now is that ebook sales are not making up half

the difference in lost mass market sales, or gains and losses in

hardcover sales (hardcovers have different issues). Taking into

account the money already lost by the industry to bankruptcies

this year, it looks bad for profit at any company this year.

Personally, I am hoping that book sales will increase just a bit in

hardcover and trade paperback, and a lot in ebooks. Otherwise,

it will be a really cold winter for publishing come the end of

December 2011.

    Now that some of the bad news is out of the way: Kathryn

and I had a great time at Ad Astra in Toronto in April (pictures

on page 3). It appears that the season of head and chest colds is

about over, and there has been no snow in more than three weeks,

although we have had some heavy April showers. We feel sorry for

our friends in the American South and Midwest whose storms and

floods are much worse than ours, after the heaviest snowfall on

record in North America this winter (I am told). But it looks as if

we will have many spring flowers, already starting to appear, and

then summer. We look forward to the conventions of summer and

to the continued flowering of NYRSF *

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

May 2011 Editorial

Waiting for Spring to Spring

    As is so often the case, we planned for spring and got more

winter. There was a storm on Friday, April 1, much rain and a pile of

snow further north and east, delaying some arrivals. I had a surprise

appointment for root canal work on Friday too, so it wasn’t the best

of days. But we all finally assembled on Saturday once again, and got

this issue done in spite of all of us being relatively tired and behind

on work in general because of the months of bad weather. We have

had to cancel, or be seriously short of staff at three of the last five

Weekly Meetings. Still, the Work Weekend proper turned out to be

sunny, though unseasonably chilly.

    Nearly all of our Work Weekend staff went to ICFA this year,

and Orlando was warmer than average. I took a bunch of pictures,

some of them on page 3 and pages 22–23. It is a fine conference

for people interested in the serious study of the fantastic in all its

manifestations, and great for hanging out with interesting people

and arguing. Plus you get a lot of good writers—Connie Willis,

Terry Bisson, Joe Haldeman, Paul Park, Cecelia Holland, Eileen

Gunn, Jeff Ford, Peter Straub, Geoff Landis, Mary Turzillo, Steve

Erikson, Ted Chiang, Kit Reed, and far too many more to list—to

hang out with. John Clute missed this year, and was missed. It was

the first year in their lives that the Hartwell kids did not attend,

and we are going to have to provide them with a dose of Florida

later this year, I think.

    Next weekend, the family is driving to Toronto for Ad Astra

(Kathryn and I are former GoHs, returning for their anniversary

con) and after that vacationing for the week, ending in Westport

with a dramatic reading of the play now then again, based on John

Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with

commentary afterward by John himself, who arrives to spend a week

in Westport before working at Stony Brook later in the month. We

expect to have many pictures for NYRSF next month.

In the continuing saga of ebooks, Publishers Weekly printed

their annual “Facts & Figures” issue a couple of weeks ago, and listed

all the adult ebook fiction and nonfiction that have sold over 10,000

copies. Out of the approximately 200,000 new titles published and

the uncounted number of older titles still available, only 275 adult

frontlist and backlist and 83 childrens’ books reached that level. I

found the gross numbers small, and figure that if all the smaller

publishers not reporting were included, the numbers might be two

or three times as large. But even so, it goes to show that the vast

majority of ebooks are still making hundreds of dollars in profits, not

thousands—which conforms with my reading of the sales figures to

which I have direct access. If you are interested in the facts of sales

figures, that issue is worth checking out. My favorite detail is that 2

of the 275 books were Ender’s Game and Gone with the Wind. You

may have other favorites. Those of you who are interested in the

odds of making money on literary properties can do some interesting

calculations. We have not yet seen in 2011 a bump up in ebook sales

comparable to the bump in 2010.

    NYRSF struggles along, always trying to sell more subscriptions

and renewals, and back issues, and to encourage more volunteer

contributions. We are on a tighter budget than we used to be, and

it is getting to be time to upgrade the software and the computers in

the next year or so. Thanks to all of you who have ordered bunches

of back issues, and to all who have had to be patient through the

miserable winter while we catch up on the pile of work accumulated.

And for anyone new to the magazine, note that we accept PayPal,

give discounts to SFRA and IAFA members, and have an ongoing

sale of back issues, 40 for $20 and 80 for $40, our choice, or $2.00

each, your choice. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

 

March 2011 Editorial

In the Drifts

    We had an ice storm during this work weekend, an unwelcome change from the month of snowstorms that has given me eight snow days at home in four weeks. The storms have kept me out of the office nearly half the entire month, putting me behind in my work in a way that does not mix well with the sheer physical exhaustion of having shoveled really quite a lot of snow. In a surprising show of determination in the face of risky driving, the whole regular Work Weekend crew showed up anyway, along with Kathryn and the kids and the dog Sunshine and the cat Ambrose. And so this issue is prepared.

    This is the March issue, and for the past few years we have made this our special ICFA issue, in honor of the support we get from the membership of the International Association forthe Fantastic in the Arts (especially in the form of subscriptions to NYRSF), and to help celebrate the annual March conference now held each year in Orlando, Florida. We’ll see you there. On the publishing front, the lack of news is at the moment most disturbing. Borders, the third largest bookseller in the US, has not paid its bills for the end of December or of January and is rumored to be discussing bankruptcy. If that eventuates, nothing else that I could imagine could make this a good year financially for book publishing in general. And for some, it will revise last year into a bad year. Having the uncertainty drag on week after week since early January has been like the snowpack on the roof building up and waiting to slide off onto you in one big foomph! Even if the metaphorical snow melts away, they have announced the closing of 150 bookstores in any case. We’ll have more to say about this next month, I think. Meanwhile, we are off to Boskone in a couple of weeks, a convention that is looking like great fun, with Charlie Stross, Joan Slonczewski, Charlaine Harris, guest artist Greg Manchess, and a special art show of old magazine cover originals. And then at the start of April, the Hartwell family goes to Ad Astra in Toronto. Department of Science Fiction in Real Life (in the future, we will all be older): Greg Benford called during the weekend to chat and gossip, as he often does, and that reminds me to advise those of you who are getting older that Benford’s life extension projects (he went emeritus five years back so he could go into business) have yielded their first product on the market: check out Stem Cell 100. This is an informal recommendation based on good impressions. It may reduce your blood pressure, lower yourcholesterol, and improve healing in some combination if you have the right genetic profile, and you won’t know that unless you try. Fortunately it appears to produce some quite noticeable results within a few weeks. I am thinking of getting a genetic profile done, since it has made me curious. The idea of living a long time has some real appeal, even if I already feel that I don’t have a good a memory as I used to (especially for proper names).The ancient and venerable craft of book reviewing needs more practitioners these days, and if you are so inclined as to want to review some sf, please contact us. The contact info is on page three. Also, our staff are getting stretched a bit thin; if you live nearby, give a serious thought to volunteering! (And when we say “nearby,” keep in mind that we have staff members in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; andour crack Distributed Proofreading team lives even further afield than that.)

—David G. Hartwell & the editors