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OtherRealms Issue 27 Part 01
Electronic OtherRealms #27
Spring, 1990
Part 1 of 11
Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Table of Contents
Part 1:
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
Part 2:
Behind the Scenes: The Quiet Pools
Michael Kube-McDowell
Past Imaginings: SF in the Comics
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Part 3:
From Beyond the Edge
Reviews by Our Readers
Part 4:
From Beyond the Edge (continued)
Reviews by Our Readers
Part 5:
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Part 6:
Small Press Overview 1989
Evelyn C. Leeper
Part 7:
Small Press Overview 1989 (continued)
Evelyn C. Leeper
Part 8:
Small Press Overview 1989 (continued)
Evelyn C. Leeper
Part 9:
Words of Wizdom
Chuq Von Rospach
Last Call
Alan Wexelblat
Part 10:
No Prisoners!
Laurie Sefton
The Agony Column
Rick Kleffel
Part 11:
Your Turn
Letters to OtherRealms
Editor's Notebook
Chuq Von Rospach
As I write this, it's Earth Day II: the sequel. It is estimated that
100,000,000 people worldwide will become environmentally aware for 24
hours. They will recycle their newspapers. They will write letters about
CFCs. They will beat their chest in anger over dead dolphins. They will
parade down streets with placards and slogans, and tonight they'll go to
bed full of revolutionary fulfillment.
Tomorrow, most of those 100,000,000 people will wake up and go back to
their old habits, except that now they'll feel better for having done
something for the environment.
That's my grump with Earth Day. Environmentalism is not one day a year.
It's not demonstrations and slogans. It's definitely not major
corporations spending lots of money on sponsorships and publicity.
Environment is a rest-of-your-life commitment towards improving your own
life and doing things to improve the life of the world around you. Earth
Day will do good things, but it's real purpose seems to be to allow
companies a way to talk about how good they are (rather than having the
company simply be good and be recognized as such) and to allow people to
make themselves believe they're doing good without really having to
commit to anything. I wonder if the negatives of giving a large chunk of
population a chance to convince themselves they can do environment one
day a year will outweigh the advantages that having an Earth Day at all.
It reminds me of a Catholic confessional: just because you can go and
have your sins forgiven once a week doesn't mean you can go and sin the
other six. Some people have never figured out that absolution without a
change in attitude is meaningless. If you allow people to absolve their
environmental sins without changing the habits that create the problems,
are you solving anything? Or are you worsening the problem?
I would rather see year-round efforts than one-day extravaganzas. Being
against Earth Day is a dangerous position, because it's guaranteed to
get you labelled anti-environment. I'm anything but -- the organizations
that are at the top of my charity list every year are the ones that deal
with environmental issues every day. But like those who see "pro-choice"
as being automatically "pro-abortion", being against Earth Day is the
same as going out and personally strangling seals or wearing mink
(speaking of hypocrisies: what's the difference between killing a
farm-bred mink for fur and killing a farm-bred cow for leather and meat?
Answer: you use less of the mink. Trapping fur animals is horrendously
inhumane and should be stopped, but people who eat meat but fight
farm-bred furs are hypocrites. All furs are not created equal, except in
the minds of those who like simple answers). I'm all for fixing the
environment and try to do my part; I'm just against palliatives for the
guilty conscience or ineffective quick-fixes. Earth Day could have been
a good start towards environmental awareness and change. The way it was
put together, however, it'll be the entire environmental effort for too
many of the participants.
Serious stuff
Now that I've fixed our environmental ills, on to some serious stuff.
It's become more and more obvious to me that there are problems with
OtherRealms and how it interacts with both my life and Laurie's. The
quarterly schedule has become increasingly erratic, and it's obvious
that for the second year in a row we're only going to get three issues
out in 1990 like we did in 1989. It's not lack of material, or lack of
interest or lack of motivation. The reason is simple: no time.
Another problem is space: OtherRealms refuses to fit in the number of
pages I want it to, forcing me to (1) find some way to squeeze it in
anyway, (2) cut stuff or (3) reduce the type size and pray the repro
doesn't turn it into a grey, unreadable mass.
It is time to Do Something about this. I think OtherRealms has gotten
complacent because I've gotten complacent. In the last couple of years,
my interests have radically changed, but my commitments haven't always
kept up.
OtherRealms is not the primary focus in my life as it used to be.
Laurie's time is also constrained, since she's taking grad classes at
Stanford and studying for the GMAT to (hopefully) enter business school
at San Jose State. Together, we still have less time for OtherRealms
than I used to spend on it solo two years ago. None of the things taking
time away from OtherRealms are things I'm willing to give up or scale
back, so I have to change OtherRealms to be viable. The alternative is
to do it badly, or end up not doing it at all.
What it comes down to is that we're going to be making a number of
changes to OtherRealms in the next year to better match what we want out
of the fanzine. We've been working on how to restructure OtherRealms for
about six months and the time has come to start the process.
This is an outline of our current plans for the new, improved
OtherRealms. First, I'm taking it off of a regular schedule. The
tentative schedule is three times a year: Aprilish, Julyish (or
Augustish) and Decemberish. If time permits, I'll do a fourth issue. If
not, maybe only two. Rather than set up fixed deadlines I won't keep,
I'll base the schedule for the next issue on when the current one mails.
The mix of material in OtherRealms is going to change. A typical issue
of OtherRealms can be as much as 80% reviews. While reviews are an
important part of OtherRealms, it's hard to publish something that is
both interesting to read and three-quarters reviews.
This problem is partly historical and partly my fault: OtherRealms
started out as a hard-core reviewzine. As the fanzine grew, I committed
to publishing columns by people I felt were worth giving special notice.
When OtherRealms downsized, though, I still tried to wedge seven columns
into a space that only has room for four or five.
To fix this, I'm cancelling three features. First is the Stuff Received
column. From talking to readers I've found that only a small percentage
of readers make use of it. At 8% of the fanzine, I can't continue
publishing all that data, especially since more complete sources for
that data -- Locus and SF Chronicle for instance -- exist.
Only the fanzine listings will survive. They'll be back next issue,
since fanzines have very small distributions and poor publicity, they
need all the notice they can get.
The next cancellation is my horror coverage. There are simply not enough
horror readers in my audience. I don't have enough space to handle SF
and Fantasy, and adding Horror makes it that much harder. This issue
will be Rick Kleffel's last Agony Column. Rick has agreed to keep
writing reviews for me and is also doing reviews for Midnight Grafitti,
so he won't disappear completely.
I am also, as of this issue, cancelling Alan Wexelblat's column. Even
after the other changes I had one column too many. A column requires me
to dedicate two complete pages, with one or two extra pages spread
between the columns. I also average about five or six pages of reviews
in the review section. I also lose 2 and a half pages to overhead: the
cover, masthead page and mailing area. On average, then, I've committed
to at least 22 pages before I start planning what will go in an issue.
The other ten pages are where the Behind the Scenes, the editorials,
letter column, essays and all the other features need to go. There's
just no room.
It's easy to decide to cut a column. It's tough to decide which column
gets cut when you think everyone is doing a fine job. While Alan has
lost his column to the changes, he has agreed to continue writing
reviews for the review section and, with Dean Lambe, will remain on the
masthead as a contributor.
The result of these changes is that the dedicated part of the fanzine
will shrink from 22-24 pages to a more reasonable 17-18 (out of 32-34)
pages. The total number of pages I'll publish will shrink slightly but
the room for things other than reviews will increase.
But wait! There's more!
There's one final change that needs to be discussed. Issue #30, which
will also be the first issue of my sixth year of publishing OtherRealms,
will be the final issue on the networks. Starting with #31, I'm only
publishing the paper version.
This is a very difficult decision to make. There are two conflicting
needs here: 99% of my readership is on USENET, but I don't enjoy being
on USENET any more. Over the last 5 years, the net has grown
significantly (OtherRealms' readership has grown from 2,500 to almost
15,000, for instance). As it has grown the number of messages in the
areas I care about have grown to the point where it's impossible to keep
track of conversations or find the information I'm interested in
finding. Also, the net has attracted a small group of troublemakers:
people whose real interest is generating controversy with personal
attacks and abuse. As an occasional target of this abuse because of my
high profile on the net, I'm sick and tired of putting up with it.
It's not true that the idiots have driven me off the net -- but it is
true that they have made the decision much easier. What is true is that
USENET and I have grown in different directions, and I've finally
decided it's time to overcome the long-ingrained habits and shift the
time I'm spending on projects to things that are important to me. I've
spent a lot of time on things that were "for the good of the net." Now
I'm going to take that time and spend it on things that that I want
instead.
Computer networks have been a focus of my life for a long time: I was on
the Arpanet in the 70's and wrote my first BBS program (for a CDC Cyber,
in Fortran, believe it or not) in 1978. I've been on-line one place or
another ever since. In the last two years, though, I've found myself
spending more time on the networks and enjoying it less. I kept logs of
my time and found I was spending up to 25 hours a week online -- time
mostly wasted. I decided it was time to make some changes, and I set a
goal of limiting myself to about five hours on-line per week. Since the
first of the year I've cancelled all of my computer accounts except the
one on GEnie and USENET. Think of how much you could do with an extra 15
hours a week. I'm not meeting my goals yet, but the difference is
astounding.
The electronic OtherRealms has been a fixture on the net and my readers
are a joy to work with. The support and feedback I get is wonderful, and
I like the give-and-take of being in direct, easy contact with my
readership. To continue publishing OtherRealms on-line I have to deal
with other sections of the net as well and the problems they cause far
override any positive aspects of keeping OtherRealms on the net.
So it's time for the electronic edition of OtherRealms to die. I chose
issue 30 because it's a milestone -- I'll have finished five years of
publishing the fanzine. know a lot of you will miss it. So will I, but
there aren't any feasible alternatives. I've delayed it too long
already.
The Bottom Line
For a fanzine to survive it has to meet the needs of its owner. If it
doesn't, it dies. I've changed and now it is time for OtherRealms to
change as well. I want to be as happy celebrating OtherRealms' tenth
birthday as I am celebrating its fifth, but that means positioning it so
I can enjoy publishing it for the next five years. I can't do that
without cutting off some readers and undoubtedly pissing off some more,
but the alternative is worse. I want to publish something that's more
personal without losing the essential focus on books, that's more
fannish without making it an egozine, that's got a wider range of
interests without losing the kernel that makes OtherRealms special.
There are going to be some rough edges and false starts in the next year
or so, but it's time for the journey to start.
Gads, I'm just a bundle of good news this issue, aren't I?
So what are critics worth, anyway?
The other day I got a fanzine, Black Hole #29 (edited by Ian Creasey,
Leeds University Union, P.O. Box 157, Leeds LS1 1UH, UK). I mention it
only because Creasey wrote a very negative review of OtherRealms. Among
other things, he says "tries hard to be an incisive and interesting
forum of criticism but ends up being rambling and boring" and "...but a
zine devoted to criticism..."
Creasey doesn't like OtherRealms because it's a terrible criticism
magazine. He completely missed the fact that OtherRealms isn't, and
never has been, a criticism-oriented fanzine. It's a reviewzine, which
is another beastie entirely. His entire 'criticism' is that OtherRealms
isn't the kind of fanzine he thinks it should be and therefore it's bad --
while ignoring the fact that it was never intended to do what he's
claiming I'm doing a bad job of in the first place.
Which is, of course, bad criticism. A bad critic or book reviewer writes
in a form of "why this isn't the kind of book I would have written this
as" instead of "what kind of book should this have been and how would
the author have improved it?"
The majority of reviews of OtherRealms are positive. Of the negative
reviews, many are of this type. Sometimes a fanzine critic has some
interesting points (I was reviewed in Anvil a while back, and the
reviewer there brought up a number of problems, leading to various
changes in OtherRealms).
I bring all this up not to argue with Creasey, but to make a few points
that seem to need repeating. First, reviewing is not criticism. They're
different skills with different viewpoints. Second, critics and
reviewers sometimes blow it. Third, while a poor review is worthless, in
many cases it's impossible to tell good reviewing or criticism from the
bad stuff until it's too late because it might seem reasonable -- until
you know the facts.
Which is a cautionary tale for anyone reading reviews and criticism.
Even in OtherRealms.
See you all next issue! 2
------ End ------
