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