David G. Hartwell

Flatiron Night: Report from Afterward

As of this morning, I am at home and finishing cleanup for the arrival of family visitors from the Midwest.

During the blackout of 2003, I chose to be marooned, along with Jim Minz and his wife, Sondi -- who brought food -- and Gavin from advertising, in the Tor offices in the formerly air-conditioned and still quite cool Flatiron Building (rather than venture out into the heat and crowds to find a way home).

The hard part was really the first hour, which was a flurry of anxiety and discovery. It took a half an hour gathered around the one working radio to figure out that most everyone should just leave immediately and walk home if possible. Some people instantly invited others to share their apartments. A frowning Kathleen Fogarty appeared, saying that she and her assistant Melanie had been stuck for nearly an hour in the elevator, but that John Sargeant, the President, had been there when they got out to give moral support. Much later, at 8:30 or so, Dolores, Linda Quinton's assistant, arrived up the 14 flights of stairs and left with some water and soda from the Tor supply for herself and her roommate in their oven-like walk-up apartment. It was a moderately pleasant experience, marred by the gradual disappearance of civilized conveniences such as the phones (after 4 hours), stairwell and lobby lighting (after 8 hours or so), and running water (perhaps 12 hours), and the lack of batteries for any of the many radios and appliances. But it never got hot.

On Friday morning at 8:30, Linda Quinton arrived to work for the morning with her fine dog, Sam, and the other overnighters left. John Sargent, covered with sweat and carrying his in-line skates, arrived up the stairs, from Brooklyn, with stories of his walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cheerful atmosphere, to take care of his company. After spending a few hours cleaning my office, I gave up on the predicted return of electricity (and fresh water in the taps and toilets, and walked to Grand Central. The trains were scarce and random, so I took a diesel to Tarrytown at about ten miles an hour (the signals were out) and finally arrived home at 3:30 pm. The first person I met in Pleasantville told me he had waited in Grand Central all night and had arrived in town at 5:38 am. His fondest memory was the first sight of the lights in the North White Plains station as the train neared home. I was happy to have made the choice I did. I do not in the end feel that I lost by the experience.

And I have a number of fine visual images to treasure, such as the nearly full moon rising over the darkened buildings and the park full of people below, and the Empire State building up an empty Fifth Avenue at eight am.

The blackout of 1965 happened a month after I first came to New York City to be a graduate student, and is on the whole a pleasant memory of friendly people and a warm, party atmosphere on the West Side, where I walked around for six hours before staying in a friend's apartment rather than walk home. I am pleased to hear that many people had that kind of experience this time.

Now, though, my ISP seems to have been shut down for most of 36 hours, and no email from those hours seems to have survived the grid failure to reach their server, so if you did email me @tor.com you should assume that your message is lost and send another.

NYRSF Editorial 181: Sweet Sixteen

By the time you read this, the fifteenth anniversary reunion of NYRSF will be over and you can see some pictures elsewhere in the magazine. We are all older now, and presumably wiser, but the ideas behind this magazine still seem worthwhile and a necessary contribution to the sf field‹which we still interpret in the traditional broad-church fashion to be an umbrella for fantasy and horror as well, in spite of their real if fluid genre distinctions. We are forever striving toward improvement, toward longer, richer, deeper, more thoughtful reviews that consider not only the strengths and weaknesses of good books, but also the context of the work in the body of the writer¹s own work, in the body of other current works, and in the whole tradition of such works in the field. And we also bring you essays, from the personal to the academic, from the appreciative to the critical. We seek to be a bridge between the fan community, with its concerns for the living literature, and the academic community, with its specialized and sometimes technical concerns and techniques. Much of contemporary literature has fallen nearly entirely into the hands of academics for evaluation, and we see that as undesirable, particularly for sf. We have always held the opinion that genres cohere and proceed by interaction among the writers and the audience; that not only is there an on-going conversation among genre texts, but among the writers, who see and speak to and argue with one another, and among the readers, who also see and speak to and argue (constantly) with one another and with the writers.

One of the hallmarks of a NYRSF work weekend, other than unanticipated problems or disasters (in a new twist on an old problem, lightning struck at 4:41 A.M. and blew out our cable modem connection today), is vigorous discussion, and argument, among staff members over genre and literary matters.
That and gossip, of course. Ironically, the best gossip this weekend was in my family, not SF: my nephew Chris Chin, who lives with his family and my mother (see page 3) in Duxbury, Massachusetts, was a close witness, to the woman who gave birth silently, standing up, on the commuter train to Boston last Wednesday A.M. Many of you will have noticed this colorful story; Chris was interviewed in the Boston Globe [July 31, "Refusing help, woman gives birth aboard T"] and elsewhere. "I saw a head, then full baby fall out from her skirt, hit the floor sideways and slide the length of the doorway, stopping when he bumped up against the next row of seats. Still she stared out the window. Either she didn't know it happened or didn't want to acknowledge it.")

But back to argument, by which we mean informed disagreement and debate. In the last month, we have been to Readercon and, two weeks later, to Confluence, which are both conventions oriented toward serious discussion of timely or controversial topics. And we are leaving for Armadillocon this week, and after that is Torcon, the Toronto Worldcon. We noticed years ago that part of the impact of NYRSF was on convention programming, that issues raised in our editorials, essays, letters, and reviews often become panel topics. I think I can say with utter fidelity that everyone who has ever been on the NYRSF staff is willing and eager to discuss and disagree about sf. Sometimes this is subsidiary to a willingness to relate to others by disagreeing about any available topic. But oh, the talk goes on into the night and begins again the next morning.

Who has evidence? Who can cite examples or counter-examples? Who is generalizing based on too little reading, or the wrong examples? Who will go off and read, to continue the argument better the next time? Our attitude is: Always look at more examples, look for more evidence, and modify your arguments accordingly. And argue most about things that matter to grown-ups. Have the kind of serious conversations about art and life that you thought grown-ups could have when you were a child, but so seldom have.

And before I end this editorial, I¹d like to repeat one of our old saws. Anyone who tells you that this year¹s books are better than last year¹s books is almost certainly a liar or a publicist. A few of the books may be better, but in many years even that is not so. So, you should ideally always read an older book of good reputation for every new book you read. Even if it is an older Star Trek novel, you may well be doing yourself a real favor. And who among us has no older books around waiting to be read? The complete works of Robert A. Heinlein, or Philip K. Dick, or Ursula K. Le Guin, or Theodore Sturgeon, or Gene Wolfe, or Connie Willis, await you.

And another year of NYRSF awaits you, too. We have a restless urge to break even, so send in your renewals.