Editorial – August 2019

OK, what’s all this then?

It goes like this. The stats issued after the 2019 Hugo Award ceremony showed a distinct lack of interest in the fanzine category. As a former fanzine editor, I found that sad. Nicholas Whyte felt that we were on the verge of having to drop the category for lack of interest. Aidan Moher opined on Twitter that all of the cool kids are booktubers these days, and perhaps they are. I certainly look forward to seeing one of them win a Hugo. But I also believe that different people have different skills. I know that I can’t do video. I’m terrible on camera. I think there should be room for people who want to just write.

Now obviously I have quite enough Hugos. I’m not looking to win another one. But perhaps by getting back in the game I will encourage more people to think about the fanzine category, and to vote in it. My vote would go to Rachel Cordasco’s wonderful Speculative Fiction in Translation.

As I had the Salon Futura website, and there seemed to be no possibility of re-launching it as a semiprozine, I decided to reinvent it as a fanzine. Its not that I haven’t been generating suitable material. I have put this issue together primarily by using material that I put on my blog, Cheryl’s Mewsings, during August. The only new material is the Worldcon report. In future any book reviews, con reports and audio that I produce will appear here rather than on the Mewsings.

It my intention to consolidate all of my reviews and interviews here, even when they aren’t part of official issues of the ‘zine. That will obviously take a little while.

I also need to do a bit of clean-up of the old material as it hasn’t always fitted well into the new look of the site. Sorry about that, but I did want to get this issue out in August.

Next issue will include fiction reviews of books by Aliette de Bodard, Yoon Ha Lee, and hopefully Tamsyn Muir. There will also be non-fiction reviews of books by Gareth L. Powell and Liz Gloyn. I will run the interview that I did with Heather Child on my radio show as that will be gone from the Ujima Listen Again service by then. And I will have a report on this year’s Eurocon, TitanCon in Belfast.

Looking forward I plan to feature articles on the future of Worldcon. I have some thoughts on improving the international nature of the convention, and Kevin has some views on how the governance of WSFS might evolve.

I’m not actively looking for other contributors, but if people do have ideas please get in touch. I’m particularly interested in material about fandom and fiction from outside of the English-speaking world.