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The New York Review of Science Fiction was founded in 1988 by a group of people who were at that time the editorial staff of The Little Magazine. They included David G. Hartwell, the publisher of the magazine, who had been a founder of The Little Magazine (then known as The Quest, edited and published by Alexis Levitin) twenty-two years before, in 1965. Others were Samuel R. Delany, at whose Manhattan apartment meetings were held weekly, Kathryn Cramer, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Susan Palwick were the editorial board, and Tom Weber (who resigned at the first issue) and Greg Cox (his replacement, the first one not from The Little Magazine) were staff. Patrick Nielsen Hayden designed the magazine, and the look and feel has remained substantially the same since the first issue. We had discovered personal computing in the year before, now owned three mac plus machines among us, and the new technology was key to our plans.
We launched the magazine with a sample issue, Issue #0, that was sent out to solicit subscriptions in August of 1988, and at the end of August published volume 1, #1 (dated September 1988). We got the issue in time to take it to the World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans on Labor Day weekend, and carried it around and sold subscriptions. I paid the printing bill and established the rule that we would never send another issue to the printer without enough money to pay the bill. Several issues in the first year were delayed a week, as we had to sell more copies or more subscriptions to make the nut, but we published every month, and have ever since. One of our mottos has been "monthly til we die."
Our editorial purposes were complex. We were determined to publish a serious but not stuffy forum for the discussion of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, at a time when to our perception the reviewing and discussion situation in the US had fallen to an all-time low. We would publish reviews and essays, and features of interest to the entire community of readers and writers of science fiction and associated genres. We would furthermore edit the contents of the issues to bring them to their best form.
Then, to our surprise and delight, Stephen P. Brown launched SF Eye in June of 1988, a new magazine with a revolutionary tone that did many things we admired and some of what we planned. After a soul-searching discussion, we decided to persevere, and do it all. We wanted to prevent the serious discussion of SF from falling entirely into the hands of academics at a time when in-field SF reviewing was mostly shallow, or written as entertainment by the reviewer, expressing more feeling than sense. We wanted to present a model for a higher standard. We saw our peers as the Australian SF Review, SF Eye, and Foundation. We developed an idea of the ideal book review and Greg Cox turned it into a clear, concise and entertaining riff on convention panels: how to review the latest Samurai Vampire novel. All reviewers everywhere should read it, and certainly anyone who aspires to reviewing science fiction. We thought we were going to publish a sophisticated fanzine, but because we pay contributors a token amount, and because we accept paid advertising, we were classified a semiprozine (semi-professional magazine, or small press) by the awards rules of the SF field. We still are.
Three issue into the process of publishing the magazine, we had a disagreement over whether to maintain a monthly schedule, and Patrick and Teresa resigned. Gordon Van Gelder, Robert H.K. Killheffer, and Jim Hornfischer joined the staff, and we settled in for the long haul, adding staff and losing staff from time to time, but always getting the issue done. Most of the material in the first year was staff written, and we spent long weekends editing each other and arguing over the fine points of writing, reviewing, books, and everything including bad old popular music and good new popular music. We went to lots of conventions, too. We still try to go.
So we have come from the days of the cyberpunk reform of science fiction through the days of the New Hard SF, the New Space Opera, the New Weird, the growth of Fantasy and the decline of genre Horror, economic booms and busts, and the end of the first big century of science fiction, into the new science fiction century.
—David G. Hartwell
Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor
