Bewildering Stories

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Time and Space Come Bending Back
To Shape This Star-Specked Scene

by Don Webb

A “first anniversary” editorial might be expected to look to the past. That does need to be done. Bewildering Stories owes its existence and first year of operation to the daily and pseudomonthly efforts of “Ye Editor” and “Bottle Washer” Jerry Wright. I’ve helped out somewhat with formatting, but a lot more than that goes into managing a webzine on line. Just keeping things straight is yoman’s, yoeman’s or yeoman’s (I’ve never learned how to spell it, as Jerry can tell you) work. And Jerry has done wonders with the all-important home page background graphics. Lest he remain an unsung hero, I want to hear a rousing chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” from all the company of Bewildered and Bewilderers!

And of course we have our Inimitable Invincible Spud to thank for the basic home page and website design. We still use his original concept, although the colors have changed considerably over the pseudomonths. Spud also recently sent us an index of issues 1-25. That is something he deserves special thanks for, and it’s work that deserves to be continued by others as well as himself. I foresee an index as being very useful, especially to our readers and contributors.

And who else deserves thanks for making Bewildering Stories possible? Our contributors, of course. Without them, Bewildering Stories would be an empty shell. They are the ones we’re here for. It would be impossible and not a little presumptuous to award with great fanfare the equivalent of a Hugo or Nebula award to anyone. I don’t see what that would achieve.

But anyone — editors, readers and contributors alike — can announce a contributors’ award of their own, for whatever reasons. As a token of appreciation and encouragement, my award this year goes to Thomas R. As you can tell by his persistent use of an initial rather than his name and by his gentlemanly though very knowledgeable contributions to the Analog and Asimov’s forums, he’s rather modest. But he takes writing very seriously and is a font of ideas. His contributions to Bewildering Stories over the past year have been not only faithful in their regularity but of quite estimable quality. (Don hands Thomas R. the Bewildering Stories Friendship Award, to the applause of the assembled multitude. The award itself looks, oddly, like a befuddled potato surrounded by a tasteful pattern of electron orbits.)

Now I’m going to look to the present and future.

Among the authors welcomed in this issue, at least two write in English as a second language. We are delighted to receive their contributions along with everyone else’s and hope they will show others the way to Bewildering Stories.

In fact, Bewildering Stories considers this a great leap forward. Others may say, “Your grammar is kaput; sayonara, amigos.” We say, “No sweat.”

Those three sentences are perfectly understandable to any native speaker of English. And yet, if we count “a great leap forward” and “no sweat” as one expression each, only about half of the passage is of English origin. And those who have written to us in English as a second language deserve to be complimented on their spirit of initiative as well as their near-native proficiency.

English has not only borrowed words and expressions wholesale, its very structure seems to have been adjusted to accomodate other languages. In fact, it’s speculated that Old English became Middle English in the marketplace. When you’re trading with customers who speak Old Norse, Old French, Old Low German and Old Who Knows What, how do you communicate? You drop endings or other functional machinery and concentrate on the stems of the words, the part that conveys meaning. After a while, that begins to seem like something you might do at home.

Consider vocabulary as a kind of metaphor. We can acquire more than words from the far reaches of space:

Around the world and back again in our First Anniversary Issue: Who knows what ironic humor lurks on the computer of Lou Antonelli, on the distant, windswept plains of mysterious Texas? We can hardly wait to find out. And Paul Drew’s interstellar colony ship is captained by a very British RAF pilot without a single reference to NASA. I love it! Alex Shternshain, tell us more bedtime stories! Your style is better than Tolkien’s.

And, finally, what can one say of Cyrano but that he comes to us not from space but from time. And I don’t mean a now somewhat-distant past, either. As I mention in one of the notes, he also comes to us from our own future. I’ll explain a little more about that in an “Afterword,” hopefully in issue 53.

A kind of postscript: Jerry and I are working thoughtfully and carefully on a way to help anyone who comes to Bewildering Stories from a Net search engine such as Google or All The Web. Our use of frames, while necessary, impedes navigation within the website for anyone coming in through the “side door,” so to speak. We hope to remedy a year-long oversight and add a “Home Page” button to each page. Or maybe something else. Who knows? I’m eager to find out!

Bewildering Stories has been submitted to Google and AltaVista for listing in their database of links, and we recently exchanged links with Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and the French Wold Newton Universe (see “Links,” in our menu). We hope that this kind of outreach will lead more readers and writers to us.

We are excited about the future of Bewildering Stories. To quote Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon: “Gentlemen, nine hundred and twenty years of the Plan stretch ahead of you. The problem is yours. Go to it!”

Don Webb

Copyright © 2003 by Donald Webb