NYRSF Editorial 190: Spring Things

Many of you have responded to our solicitations for reviews and essays and this is one of the rare moments in NYRSF history when we have an inventory of essays and reviews ready for the next issue and the one after. We have been in this position for a couple of months now, and as we remarked in the last editorial, it sometimes allows us to build issues with more structural and thematic unity than is normally the case. This issue is our more usual diverse assortment of reviews and essays. But we can see some interesting possibilities for the next couple of issues.

That¹s a good thing, because we are all heavily committed for the coming summer, and need to get ahead. First off, our stalwart managing editor, Kevin J. Maroney, has found full-time employment for the first time since 2001, which will surely make his life richer and much fuller.

I recently traveled to Chicago on the invitation of Poetry, to speak on a program at the Newberry Library with Albert Goldbarth on sf and poetry. (Some of you may not know that NYRSF was founded in 1988 by the staff of The Little Magazine, which for 22 years published contemporary poetry and fiction, and whose editors over the years included among others Barbara Damrosch, Thomas M. Beeler, Marilyn Hacker, Thomas M. Disch, Carol Emshwiller, John Silbersack, Lyndall Gordon, Isobel Barzun, Joe Milicia, and Mark Kramer. There¹s much mention of magazine meetings in Samuel R. Delany¹s 1984. Back issues of The Little Magazine are still available, packed away in my basement.)
That Wednesday evening in Chicago was very pleasant (see picture), and Albert and I plan to recap some of it at the ICFA in Florida next March, where Albert will be a special guest.

For the first time in many years, I did not attend any sf convention on Easter weekend, nor will I on July 4th, though I plan to return to old habits next year. But Kathryn and the kids and I did go to the Fantastic Genres conference at SUNY New Paltz on May 1­3 and had a delightful weekend. It was a small conference, but combined some of the pleasures of ICFA with some of the pleasures of Readercon (which we will all miss this year).

By the time you read this, we will have seen some of you at Wiscon in Madison at the end of May and others at SFRA in Skokie in early June. Right after that, I must fly to Seattle (taking a one-weekend break to do the next two issues of NYRSF) for the opening of the lavish new SF Museum and Hall of Fame which will be linked like a Siamese twin to the Experience Music Project building at Seattle Center. I have always been a skeptic about the various sf museums proposed over the past couple of decades, but this one had $18 million dollars spent on it up front by Paul Allen (for which I, for one, am grateful), and will be at very least a snazzy place to visit in the next year. I gather they are going to charge admission, sell memberships, and host special events to raise money, like all other museums. It is also my understanding that they open with no endowment, so that they will start raising money from the outset. I wonder what the souvenir shop will sell? I will get to shop on the first day, June 18, and find out, though.

Somewhere in there Kathryn and I are going to finish an anthology, too.