NYRSF Issue 355 Editorial: Getting Past

Okay, it’s been a little while again. While the pandemic is not gone, here it is waning. Thanks to the efforts of local politicians, the New York government opened a region-specific vaccination site in lower Westchester which helped cut through the logistical nightmare of the early days of the vaccine rollout; as a result, our household has been vaccinated since late March. One point I make periodically is that the shape of the future is a political question, not (just) an engineering one, let alone a “science” one. Over the last year that’s become more and more obviously true of the future of the covid-19 pandemic specifically. The creation of the vaccines was a scientific miracle—especially of mrna vaccines, new technology in its first field test.

But while the prior administration was gung-ho about developing the vaccines and even boosting it through guaranteed purchases, the vaccines rollout was badly delayed by that same administration’s depraved indifference to actually “getting the shots into arms.” And even though the US has, in the last 3 months, managed to go from 1% fully vaccinated in late January to 45% fully vaccinated now, the effort within the country is still running into steep logistical problems in administering the vaccine, especially among workers who cannot risk missing a shift at work if they have reactions to the vaccine.

And that’s leaving aside that former president who won’t endorse the vaccine that he celebrated right up to the point where he secretly received his dose. And the Mendacity Industry that wants to bring him back to power has kicked into overdrive, nursing the grudges of right-wing refuseniks who will not take the vaccine even though their own exalted leader supposedly willed it into being. These rejectionists are now the largest group of unvaccinated adult Americans, and they are keeping the pandemic alive in the US; infection rates among the unvaccinated now (in mid-June) are comparable to the rates among the general population in early January.

Rejection of science, logistical incompetence, the vast disparities within wealthy countries and between them and poor countries, the rise of neo-fascist ideologues who say that conquering a disease is just a matter of national willpower—all of these have made the global situation worse, stretched out the pandemic. Outside the sphere of the heavily inoculated northeast United States, the world continues to sit at the edge of calamity. As I write this, much of South America has SARS-COV-2 infection rates comparable to the US at its peak, and while India’s surge has somewhat receded, rates are still high in South and Southwest Asia. At this week’s G-7, the leading industrial powers pledged to donate a billion vaccine doses to poorer countries, but that initiative will take over a year and, by itself, will cover only 15% of the world’s population.

I don’t mean to be bleak, but it’s exhausting to rub up against the cognitive dissonance between the US’s rush to put the pandemic behind us and the fact that there’s still an awful lot of sickness and death ahead.

That said: The narrowing of the pandemic in my neighborhood has left me with a thousand thousand smaller, long-deferred tasks to pursue as we slowly right ourselves back into what passes for normality. But normality is bursting through the concrete! I have actually returned to my office once this month, and the most unnerving thing about it was how completely unremarkable it felt to be sitting at a desk, surrounded by other people sitting at desks, all shouting, moving electrons around, eating muffins at a conference table while hearing plans for 2022 and 2023 and beyond.

One of the parts of normality that I most want to recover is getting this magazine running. We have a sizable backlog of articles and reviews now, enough so that we can actually assemble issues thematically. This issue is looking back to the early days of sf: two articles on Hugo Gernsback, articles on Heinlein, Asimov, and H.G. Wells, plus newcomers Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, and Zenna Henderson. We’re also delighted to have the return of Michael Swanwick’s “Singular Interviews” for at least the next few issues.

As I noted last month, we have a new system for assigning books to reviewers, and I’ll be sending out a batch of new titles shortly after this issue goes online. Again, if you’re interested in reviewing for us—whether you’ve done so for us in the past or not—please drop me a line at [email protected] and we will see what we can do together.

Finally, we may have unriddled the problems of our stalled print-on-demand version. More details next issue, which I hope will be very soon indeed.

Stay healthy. Since you’ve made it this far into the future, it would be a shame not to see what comes next.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors