Pointing and Seeing (Editorial, NYRSF 313)

A miscellany of thoughts this time.

Last month’s editorial on the World Fantasy Award statuette crowded out any other concerns, so I wanted to note that NYRSF has now completed 26 years of monthly publication, 2 full years in electronic publication, and 1 full year in our less eyestrainy layout. Thank you, all, as always.

One of the harsh realities of the pleroma of distraction in which we live is that it’s a constant struggle to attract new readers, and NYRSF has not been doing as good a job of that as we would like. The best way to cultivate an engaged audience is through word of mouth, so if you read and enjoy NYRSF, either in magazine format or on the web site, please let your friends know! Our electronic versions are drm-free, so you can loan them out to people who would find them interesting. Spread the word.

We’re making NYRSF individual issues more readily available. Starting with this issue, the Draft2Digital service will publish NYRSF through various online retailers such as B&N (for the Nook), Kobo, iBook, and Scribd. Subscriptions will still be available exclusively through Weightless Books, because they’ve been wonderful to us.

That said, we’re thinking of holding an actual subscription drive, and we’re soliciting ideas. What premiums would you like to see? If you’ve been on the fence about subscribing, what would help you clear the top? Let us know!

On an unrelated matter, I’m very happy to mention that Bernadette and I are attending this year’s World Fantasy Convention in the Washington DC area. Bernadette was a regular attendee back in its formative years, but I’ve only been to the Saratoga Springs instance back in 2007. If you’ll be there, give us a shout!

Finally, this time, a memory. When I was around 9 years old, my maternal grandparents took me to Key West. (They lived in Homestead, Florida, so it was just a day trip for us.) For years, I thought my only memory of the trip was seeing Ernest Hemmingway’s house, which is a museum to the author but which primarily interested young me because of its population of polydactylic cats. Recently, though, I had another memory come back to me. I was pondering genre boundaries in the wake of Paul Kincaid and Nina Allan’s appearance on last week’s Coode Street Podcast <jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-202-nina-allan-paul-kincaid-and-the-state-of-british-science-fiction> and I found myself thinking of literature oceanically. Earth has only one ocean, but we speak of it as if there were four, or five; then we divide it into bays and inlets and seas and give them all names. As I thought of this, I remembered standing at Key West’s Southernmost Point while my grandpa Bob gestured. “Over there is the Atlantic,” he said, sweeping left, then with a gesture to the right, “and over here is the Gulf of Mexico, and this is the exact point at which they meet.” And the dark waters of the Straits of Florida stretched before us, warm and green and heedless of the distinctions we draw.

It is possible to overstretch metaphors. Metaphors are wheelbarrows; overload them and they fall over. But it’s particularly amusing to me, writing this now, to realize that Key West’s Southernmost Point, the locus of this misguided attempt to divide this-against-that, is itself a false witness: Standing at the Point, one can look south and immediately see parts of Key West further beyond.

But it is our nature to split apart and bring together, just as it is the ocean’s nature to flow.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors