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