William
Sanders
Senior Editor and Mean Old Bastard Emeritus
Hey, will you look at this? Issue Number Four. Yes. A full year's worth. We did it. How about that?
Back last summer when we put out that first issue, I'm sure a lot of people said, or thought, "Yeah, it looks great, they've got some dynamite stuff — but will it last?"
And who could blame them? I know I damn well thought it, plenty of times, during those first days. We had set ourselves some awfully high standards; could we maintain that same level of quality over future issues? Would we be able to attract pro-grade writers, get enough first-rate work to fill issue after issue?
(Especially since we didn't know yet whether we'd be able to pay them more than token amounts. That was the reason for the widely misunderstood invitation-only policy of the first few weeks of our existence, and the reason we deliberately filled the first issue with the work of personal friends, who would be more understanding if it turned out to be a dry hole. Fortunately that question was cleared up in short order by some generous donors.)
Well, I'd say that question has been pretty decisively answered. If you've been with us through preceding quarters, you know we've been able to bring you the work of some of the best writers in the field, from award-winning famous names to brilliant newcomers.
Or if you're new to Helix, check the archives and prepare to say oh wow.
And as you can see, in this final issue of our first publishing year, we've done it again. For one big thing we are honored by the presence of Robert Reed, widely recognized as one of the very finest writers in contemporary SF, with one of the most powerful antiwar stories I've read in a long time.
James Killus is another well-known name in the genre; he joins us with an unusual story set in my own generation. Noted poet Mike Allen, whose work has graced our poetry section in the past, teams up with Charles Saplak for a gritty fantasy with a nasty sting in the tail. Jennifer Pelland, whose "Captive Girl" (Helix #2) drew praise from readers and critics alike, returns with another disturbing story set in the far future.
But it's not all familiar faces. Sara Genge is hardly a well-known name in the genre, though if she keeps writing stories like this one it can only be a matter of time. Pras Stillman is not yet as well known as she should be; perhaps this will help change that. As for our own Berry Kercheval's contribution...well, we're trying to persuade him to get help.
We've been more than pleased by the response from writers, but we've been surprised, too. On the whole things haven't gone at all as we expected.
Our original idea was to create a home for stories that had been generally rejected as unpublishable for various reasons unrelated to literary quality. In practical terms, I figured this would mostly consist of trunk stories — stories that professional writers had been unable to sell, and stashed away in disgust.
But we really haven't gotten all that many stories smelling of mold spores and cockroach doody. A few, yes — some of them real wowsers — but for the most part people have sent in fairly new stories, that they had submitted to perhaps one or two of the big print magazines, or maybe a webzine or two, before sending them to us. And there have been a few — not many, but more than I'd have expected — that had never been submitted anywhere else at all.
Which baffled me; and finally I told one writer, "You realize you could have sold this to X______ and gotten more money than we'll be able to pay you."
Her reply: "Yes, I know. But more people will read it at Helix, and it will get reviewed, and do more for my visibility. And that's all short fiction is good for any more. No matter where it's published, the money doesn't really amount to much."
And I'm afraid that's true. The days when it was possible to make a living writing short SF are long gone, and very unlikely ever to return. The Big Three pay a lot more than we do, as does at least one webzine; the difference is indeed significant — but let's face it, it's still not enough to live on, or even make a serious contribution to the average person's annual budget.
So the value of publishing short fiction, in terms of a writer's career, is primarily that of building and maintaining a name — advertising, if you like. From that angle, Helix no doubt looks a lot better, even though it still doesn't carry the prestige of the established deadtreezines.
All of which is good for us, in that it helps bring us first-class writing. But at the same time it's a sad state of affairs for the genre — and not just SF, of course; the short story is virtually dead everywhere nowadays, unless you count that goofy crap in the New Yorker or those "little" circlejerkzines with names like Sphincter. And so passeth a glory from the Earth; but meanwhile we do what we can.
Our regular readers will by now have noticed a couple of changes. For one thing, we dumped the book reviews. We talked it over and decided it wasn't something we needed to be doing, since there are plenty of online book-review venues; we felt we should concentrate on doing what we do best, which is to say publishing first-class, risk-taking fiction.
And poetry, which brings us to the other change. We figured we ought to give you something to make up for the loss of the reviews; and the poetry section has been amazingly popular, far more so than we'd expected. (Another of those pleasant surprises.) So as of now we're going to be running more poems per issue.
Again, if you like what you read in this issue, please consider helping us pay those who wrote it. Remember, Helix is entirely dependent on your donations; you are the ones who determine how much the contributors make - so show your appreciation by hitting that Paypal button, or reaching for your checkbook or whatever. Because you know it's the right thing to do.
Note: Several animals were badly hurt or killed in the making of this issue. But fuck 'em.
Lawrence
Watt-Evans
Managing Editor and Freelance Pedant
You Look Mahvelous!
When the World Wide Web was first created, going on fifteen years ago, it wasn't much like its present self. For one thing, it was mostly plain text; graphics were an afterthought. The http: at the front of every web address stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol," and those poor naive techies really thought of it as a text medium. One of the most popular early browsers, Lynx, didn't show graphics at all; it was pure text.
Hard to believe that now, looking at all the Flash and Shockwave, the animations and elaborate CSS layouts, and all the other bells and whistles. The modern web designer has tools and techniques available that those poor slobs working in HTML 1.0 couldn't imagine. You can do really amazing stuff on the web now.
You can also screw up in ways no one could have imagined back then.
The thing about sophisticated tools is that using them properly requires a sophisticated user. When I first got on the web, anyone who could throw a few tags into basic text could get work designing webpages for technophobic corporate types who wanted a presence on the electronic frontier but who had no clue how to do it themselves. As the web evolved, though, that changed. The tools got more complex, the designs got more complex, and the demands put on the designers got more complex.
Practically anyone can throw together a basic webpage now; there's plenty of software around that'll do the actual coding for you. You just plug in your text and your pictures, and voila!
But will it look good?
When we started playing around with the idea of starting an online magazine, we wanted to do it right, or not do it at all. We agreed that if we couldn't get enough good fiction, we wouldn't do it at all. If we couldn't get good poetry, we wouldn't run poetry. And so on.
And if we couldn't make it look good, we wouldn't do it. There are (naming no names) lots of webzines out there that look like amateur, thrown-together crap, and we saw no point in putting out another one.
That was not something we took lightly. Will and I have both put stuff on the web, but putting together a magazine was a little more ambitious than anything we'd attempted. We wanted a real designer, but we had basically no budget...
And then our webmistress, Melanie Fletcher, signed on, and while Will and I and the rest of the staff were still tentatively kicking around a few ideas, she read through what we'd agreed was called for, put together a package, and said, "How about this?"
"This" was very close to the Helix you see before you right now. We all looked at it and said, "Okay, we can make it look good!"
And we do think it looks good. Maybe it's not a hugely innovative layout, using the three-column set-up, but we saw no reason to re-invent the wheel. It works. Everything's there, without being too cluttered. It's distinctive. It's readable. We like it. We hope you do, too.
There are webzines out there that look hopelessly amateurish, with oddly-colored backgrounds and lame or nonexistent graphics. There are webzines that have clearly been created by art majors, all beautiful design and unreadable content. There are people who are obviously unclear on the concept that you need a contrast between the text and the background if you want people to actually read anything. There are webzines where you can't find anything. And there are webzines that are just sloppy.
Some pages out there look great in some browsers, lousy in others. Some look fine on some monitors, lousy on others. Some can't be read at all if you don't have the right browser set-up, or if you don't have the right plug-in software.
Some are so full of bells and whistles, with pop-ups and animations and whatnot, that it's hard to actually see the content.
We really, really wanted to avoid all those errors. We think we did — and it's entirely Melanie's doing. So I'm taking this opportunity to publicly thank her for creating and maintaining our site for us.
One traditional feature of fiction magazines used to be illustrations. As you will have noticed, we don't have any. That was a conscious decision we made. Illustrations require time and effort on someone's part; if you want good ones, you need good and reliable illustrators, people who can read a story and find the right scene to illustrate, and have it all done to everyone's satisfaction before deadline. Such artists aren't easy to come by – well, not unless you pay them decently, which would be problematic for us. We felt it was more important to put our limited financial resources toward the writers and staff.
Again, if we were going to do it, we wanted to do it right. We didn't think we could do story illustrations right.
Also, graphics eat bandwidth. Sure, a lot of you folks are reading this on DSL or cable or some other form of broadband, where a few nice pictures only take a fraction of a second to load, but some of our readers are still on dial-up. Hell, some of our staff are still on dial-up. And our server space isn't infinite; if we keep going for a few years and archive everything, that's going to add up.
So we chose not to illustrate the stories.
We know the web isn't all text anymore, but it's the text that we focus on here at Helix.
So — we did put some thought into what goes on our virtual pages besides the actual words. We've been very lucky that we had Melanie to make us look good; we think she's contributed a lot to the success of our little project, and that's without even mentioning her story in #2. As a staff member she does get a share of donations, but that's her only pay — that, and the adulation of her fans.
Feel free to provide both.