What’s Good (Editorial, NYRSF 325)

Welcome to our twenty-eighth year. We’re behind schedule again (helped in no small part by a leaking water heater and other household mishaps). I have some hope that the October issue will be closer to on-time, though it will be tough to hit it exactly; however, the November issue should get us back on track even with the World Fantasy Convention at the beginning of the month, because the Thanksgiving weekend will give me uninterrupted time to work on the magazine. Here’s hoping.

Over the last few months we’ve had a number of major articles about scientific errors in our fiction—not only the long-running series on medical errors by Drs. Kovacs and MacDonald, but also Eric Schaller’s article on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl in the June issue and, of course, the first two articles on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora in this very issue. I’m happy with all of these articles, because I enjoy learning things (that’s one of the driving pleasures of science fiction, after all), but I do have some comments about them collectively.

Scientific accuracy has never been the most important quality of a science fiction story—or at least it hasn’t been since Wells grabbed the reins of sf and flew to the moon and the crab-haunted beaches of the dying sun. While Gernsback tried to yoke scientifiction to amateur electronics, his magazine was never as successful as Weird Tales or Astounding. The Golden Age of science fiction began with A. E. van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” and for a decade after, his hallucinatory, science-flavored inventiveness, unburdened by sense or coherence, was enormously successful. He was consistently one of the most popular and respected writers in the Astounding stable, ostensibly the home of “rigorous” science fiction.

My point isn’t that scientific accuracy is unimportant; if it were, we wouldn’t have run all these articles. I simply don’t want to overemphasize it. I’m delighted that we have Jonathan Strahan’s appreciation to accompany the Benford and Baxter (et al.) articles: Aurora is an important novel even if the science doesn’t hang together perfectly—a point that Baxter and company make several times as well.

Our focus at NYRSF has always on the strengths and weaknesses of good works, because it’s more important to help good works rise above the noise than it is to shove bad works back down into it. But talking about the weaknesses helps the next round of works be even better.

(For a wonderful take on Verne versus Wells, go see this installment of Hark, A Vagrant: <www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=231>.)

On a completely different note, a re-formed (and reformed) version of the Lunarians are in the process of resurrecting Lunacon, the long-running New York regional sf fan convention. They are fundraising a small pile of seed money to help get going again and I recommend that if you can, you should toss them a few bucks through the Save Lunacon Indiegogo campaign: <www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-lunacon-for-2016>.

Finally, as mentioned, several of us will be at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, the first week of November <www.wfc2015.org>. We hope to see many of you there; the last WFC in Saratoga Springs was a delight.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors