Once More Around the Sun (Editorial, NYRSF 324)

With this issue we complete our twenty-seventh full year of publication and our third full year post-paper. It would not be possible without the hard work of all of the delightful people listed on the masthead and the (also delightful and hardworking) people at Weightless Books, and they all deserve more thanks that I am capable of giving them. I hope you-all appreciate what they do.

We have migrated the Work Weekends out of the ancestral home of Stately Hartwell Manor into the more cityish Valentine’s Castle with relatively little incident, and I have to say I am delighted to have cut out the 3-5 hours of driving entailed. Also, man is it so much nicer to have air conditioning for the summer Weekends.

The year has been chaotic, which has been reflected both in the number of times that we have missed our end-of-month deadline and in the backlog of tasks that have languished—most visibly, the fact that we still haven’t solved the formatting problems that forced us to take the print-on-demand copies offline. That’s next highest on my task list.

(There’s no reason to believe we won’t be back on schedule next month. Let’s blame this one’s lateness on the chaos caused by Worldcon and move on.)

If you are one of the people who reads the editorial first (and I thank you for that), I recommend that you go and read our feature article on Post-Punk SF before you read the next paragraph. Thanks.

Welcome back. Whew, isn’t that something? A full critical apparatus assembled to introduce, discuss in depth with examples, and move beyond an entire fictitious science fiction movement. When I realized what he’d done, I sat back stunned and genuinely awed. Lem, Borges, and all the Interpostliminalists would be proud.

As I’m sure you know by now if you have even the faintest scintilla in the Hugo Awards, the “No Awards for Slates” option won out in this year’s Hugo final voting. This is the approach I advocated in my previous editorials, excluding the Puppy finalists not on grounds of quality or lack thereof, nor on the politics or personal foibles of the people running either of the Puppy slates. This was entirely a vote against the underhanded tactics that resulted in those finalists reaching the ballot. (The kindest thing that can be said about slate voting in this type of open-ended popular vote is that it is “technically not cheating.” That’s not a kind thing to say at all.) The people who were dragged onto the Puppy ballots without being consulted can be assured that this vote absolutely was not a personal rejection of you but of an unacceptable process.

There are larger issues involved in the Puppy movement that I don’t feel the need to rehash right now, issues of culture war, of reader communities and their protocols, of the powers and perils of our deeply interconnected communications. But at its core, the Puppy fight was about a group of people deciding to “not technically” cheat their way into an award and they were rebuffed, and that much, at least, is good. The Puppies will be back next year. It’s not particularly clear what they hope to accomplish in a fourth bite at the apple they claim is poisoned, but it will certainly be something.

Finally, tying together several of the above threads: There is another proposal currently floating around to abolish the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. The Semiprozine has always been something of an odd duck—as Kevin Standlee says, this isn’t a term that exists outside of sf fandom. But the award, which has been around for 30+ years, recognizes that there has always been a pool of magazines run completely on volunteer effort (as fanzines are) but which pay their contributors (as professional magazines do).

Three years ago, the rules of the award changed to clarify the nature of the magazines eligible. In the years since, the long list of nominees category has grown tremendously in variety and depth in recognition of the efflorescence of small-press fiction magazines both online and off-. The Hugo nomination is a small repayment for the hard work of running a magazine for no money.

There’s an excellent chance that NYRSF will never get nominated for the award again because of this change in focus. If this means that more people will discover Clarkesworld and Apex and Strange Horizons and Lightspeed, well, I can live with that. Save the Semiprozine!

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors