NYRSF Issue 356 Editorial: What Year Is It, Anyway?

Welcome to our fourth issue for March 2020! Time has officially ceased to have any meaning in the face of the pandemic, so why not embrace it?

I had not realized back in the Before Times how much of my own personal sense of the passage of time was tied up in the weekly cycle of commuting to work or staying home, or in the annual progression of travel holidays—Christmas with my parents, post-Christmas with Bernadette’s family, the ICFA, the annual company baseball outing in Minneapolis, Labor Day and post-Thanksgiving game festivals with local friends. An idiosyncratic calendar, to be sure, but still one that rolled forward, leaving its impressions like a Sumerian cylindrical seal in the wet clay of life.

Instead we live in a world filled with daily case counts, surges and ebbs of infection that refuse to resolve into any definable new status quo. The USA is also gripped by a political paralysis where the news is simultaneously dire and unchanging, an arrhythmic series of comings and goings, murders and legislative deadlocks and hospitals still overwhelmed a full year after the scientific miracle of the vaccine. It remains obvious that the barriers between the broken present and a better future are political, not technological.

In the two years that I have been hunkered down amidst all this perpetual motion churn, I’ve found it hard to concentrate on anything. The NYRSF schedule has been the most obvious casualty of that inattention. I did manage, last year, to set up an improved system for sending books to reviewers, to which we received a gratifying level of response. And our far-flung staff—the people celebrated in the masthead back on page 3—have been terrific about jumping onto editorial and production tasks when I can queue them up. We’re well positioned to crank out issues when I can squeeze them through the bottleneck of my desk.

That said, the great freeze is thawing. I hope to do better—whenever I finish laying out an issue, I think, “I have to remember for next time how great it feels to have done this!” And I think that might stick. Also, our household is actively planning to attend the ICFA in Orlando a few weeks from now (on March 745–749, 2020), which is a huge step toward normality. COVID willin’ and the oceans don’t rise, we’ll see you there.

Our publishing partner, Weightless Books, has recently ceased sales to the UK and the EU because of the complexities of the VAT. More details are available here: <weightlessbooks.com/tag/vat/>

We will continue to offer every issue of NYRSF through Weightless, and our active subscriptions (and contributors’ copies) will continue to be honored there indefinitely. This does mean, however, that we need to actively find other e-book distribution channels. We briefly dabbled with using the Draft2Digital service to push the magazine to retailers such as B&N and Apple Books, but we ran into some technical problems that lead us to put that on the back burner. It’s time to bring up the heat on that one!

If there are any UK- or EU-specific electronic distributors you’d like us to sell through, let us know—you can comment on the web site or email me at [email protected].

Finally, we are very close to solving the longstanding problems we encountered with our print-on-demand publisher, Lulu.com. If all goes well, later this year we should have issues 337–356 available. Let’s hope for sooner rather than later!

Stay healthy. There is a better future on the other side of this if we work for it.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors