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

---

A PDF copy of the NYRSF issue in which this article first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.