COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Weird Tales #327 (Vol. 58, No. 3).
Copyright © 2002 by Wildside Press LLC.
All rights reserved.
Cover by Dominic Harman
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
THE EYRIE
Who We Are & How We Do It
For all that humility may be the greatest of our many virtues (for which the snappy comeback line, invented by John Ashmead, is, “You know, you may be right.”), we thought that we might talk about ourselves for once. Some readers might want to know what goes on in an editorial office and how a magazine like this is put together.
George Scithers is the senior member of the team. He attended his first science fiction convention in 1954, was chairman of the 1963 World Science Fiction Convention (DisCon I), where he developed several innovations in the form. He has been editing professional magazines almost continuously since 1976, when he became the founding editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (abbreviated IA’sfm in those days and pronounced, roughly, “Yas-fim,” which sounded close enough to a Yuggothian profanity that before long everyone was calling it Asimov’s, as they still do, since the magazine persists under the able editorship of Gardner Dozois.) George edited that magazine up until 1982 and won two Hugo Awards for his efforts, discovering, developing and establishing many writers whose names are still familiar: S.P. Somtow, John M. Ford, Barry Longyear, Nancy Kress, and quite a few others. (A sister magazine, Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine, lasted but four issues.) Early in the Asimov’s days, Darrell came aboard as an editorial assistant.
George then moved on to edit Amazing Stories between 1982 and 1986, before joining with Darrell and John Betancourt (who now publishes Wildside Press books and has edited any number of projects on his own) to found Terminus Publishing Company, Inc., and revive Weird Tales® in 1987. (Our first issue, Spring 1988, was available at the World Fantasy Convention in October of 1987. We must have started editing it about June.) George also edited (between 1959 and 1982) what would today be called a “small press magazine,” Amra, devoted to Robert E. Howard and matters swordly and sorcerous, for which he won another two Hugo Awards in the Best Fanzine category. George has also written some science fiction, which, he proudly points out, he sold to three of the most distinguished editors in the field, John W. Campbell, Frederik Pohl, and Ben Bova.
However, the primary “we” in these editorials is Darrell Schweitzer, who writes most of them, which is to say that the editorials are Darrell’s compositions, but George alters them on occasion. Darrell is, of course, a longtime columnist, whose book review column ran in Science Fiction Review and then in Aboriginal SF almost continuously from 1976 to 2001, and isn’t dead yet, as it will continue in Science Fiction Chronicle in the future. Darrell also had a movie-review column in Quantum and later in Pirate Writings for a while. He had a general column (i.e. essays on any topic, many of which later found their way into his book Windows of the Imagination) in a later incarnation of Science Fiction Review.
Darrell wrote other non-fiction features over the years, not the least of which was a facetiously faked letter column (letters and all) for Amazing Stories, November 1982. His fiction you are probably familiar with; we’ve included one of this stories in this issue. He insists that his best fiction books are the novel The Mask of the Sorcerer and the collection Refugees from an Imaginary Country. He’s been nominated for the World Fantasy Award three times, twice for best collection, once for best novella (“To Become a Sorcerer,” from Weird Tales® #303). Darrell admits he learned most of his feature-writing chops from Richard E. Geis, the editor of Science Fiction Review, who is arguably the world’s greatest fanzine editor.
Darrell and George might be described (since John Betancourt went on to other things) as two sides of the editorial pyramid. The third side consists of the people who have supported the magazine over the years.
Carol Adams is a long-time teacher in the Philadelphia school system. She has been very generous with her time over the years. Diane Weinstein is an artist and science fiction fan, the wife of Lee Weinstein (who used to work with us in the Asimov’s days), a noted fantasy scholar and editor. Robert Waters is an electronic-games designer and a writer. We bought a story from him recently. Tim Burke is a writer too, whose work has appeared in Terra Incognita (a magazine published by Jan Berrien Berends, who used to work for us before he went into business for himself). Tim is also part-owner of a comic-book store. Joe McCabe is a chemical engineer who is also working on his MBA at Penn State University. There are others, whose names you see on the masthead. With changing members of the cast, we are pretty much the same editorial team that was editing Asimov’s in the ’70s and Amazing in the ’80s.
So that’s who we are, and together we claim that we have read more bad fiction than anyone else alive, which inevitably leads us to the subject of what editors do.
The first part of editing is selection. While we may occasionally solicit a story from a favorite writer, or even decide to buy first North American rights to something we read in an overseas periodical, our main task is to select stories we want to publish from what editors since time immemorial have somewhat unflatteringly called the “slush pile.”
A slush pile is that mass of unsolicited material which comes in the mail, perhaps ten to twenty manuscripts a day. To be fair, our slush pile is really not that bad. Gratifyingly, many manuscripts we receive range from pretty good on up to outstanding. The level of writing — not to mention the professionalism of the manuscript preparation — is considerably higher than what we saw in the ’70s. We attribute this mostly to the rise of the small press magazines (which began in earnest in the ’70s), which have tended to train the new writers before they get to us. We also hope that our own influence and the tens of thousands of guidelines flyers we’ve sent out over the decades had something to do with it.
So if you’re harboring paranoid fantasies about editors cackling over the awful things they get in the mails, we have to disappoint you. We, at least, have never received anything like the legendary manuscript in orange ink on yellow paper, rolled up and tied with a bow, which came to John W. Campbell (the famous editor of Astounding and Analog between 1938 and 1971) or even the one Ben Bova got, which was typed without a ribbon, with carbon paper put in backwards, so that the text was a smeary reverse-image.
Unfortunately, we now see (but do not even try to read) manuscripts from people who have just discovered how many words they can cram onto a page by using type much too small for a telephone book, or who think that the programmers who write word processors have the remotest idea of how a manuscript should be formatted.
So our first task is to open the day’s mail and to read anything that can be read. This is any editor’s first duty, since the good stories come in that way, and every writer is, at some point, the author of an unsolicited manuscript from someone of whom no one has ever heard. It is possible for a lazy editor to assemble issues of a magazine by just buying submissions from people he knows and ignoring all the rest, but that leads to stagnation, ill-will, and the likelihood that if the next Stephen King’s story is in that editor’s slushpile, he won’t find it.
George is usually our first reader, following the example of the great John Campbell, who read everything that came in to Astounding. If a story is of any interest at all, it is put aside for others to read as well. Usually we buy stories by majority vote, with George and Darrell agreeing, or one of those two being overruled by the other and everyone else. (And if the story is by Darrell, he doesn’t get to vote and the rest have to be unanimous.)
One of the first things we discovered, back in 1976, is that the tremendously long editorial response times that are so often taken for granted are completely unnecessary. George shocked the science fiction field in the ’70s by demonstrating that most manuscripts can be turned around in days, not weeks, months, or years. (He also invented the custom of sending authors page-proofs, which no magazine of that time did.)
For the deep, dark secret of editorial reading is simply this: a manuscript takes just as long to read today as it does six months from now. Cope