NYRSF 344 Editorial: Years End

So another year ends. We only brought out six issues over the last 12 months, but I’m happy with how they came out, and our platters are full to overflowing with material for the next few months so I have some hope that we will start to stagger back toward monthly.

At year’s end we think of the people around us. Some of our friends are gone, including Michael Levy, as are some great figures, including Brian Aldiss. (How ironic that Brian died just before the absolute mainstream explosion of awareness of sexual harassment.) Our Theatre Critic Emerita, Jen Gunnels, and NYRSF fellow traveler Marco Palmieri launched Tor Labs, a new line of freely available audio novels in podcast form. Our webmeister (and so, so much more) Alex Donald is fulfilling a longtime dream to move to France, but he promises to contribute as much as he can. He will have a much longer and wetter drive for the Work Weekend, of course. If you’re within easy travel distance of New York City and feel like joining our merry team, drop me a line. We are odd but we have our fun.

This year saw the end of one of the political truths that I really thought would be unassailable in America: that Nazis are bad. While the broader sf fannish community moved to repel the neofascist attack on the Hugo awards, the higher echelons of the American government gave repeated big wet kisses to (among others) torch-bearing mobs, anti-Semitic child molesters, dictators who brag of killing criminals with their own hands, and ethnic cleansers. Paul Krugman likened our current president to Asimov’s Mule, but the far more worrying prospect is that he’s a predictable consequence of the hidden equations that govern human history. It is unmistakable that one of the possible uses of science fiction is the exploration of possible paths forward. The new future is always beginning now.

Years end so that new years can begin.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors