William
Sanders
Senior Editor and Mean Old Bastard Emeritus
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." - Oscar Wilde
You are looking at something that I am very proud of.
That is something I don't often get to say. (And the last time I did there were some tiresome problems with the police afterward, but never mind that.)
This magazine had its origins in a discussion among some of us disgruntled bastards concerning the present rather discouraging state of speculative fiction; and in particular the timidity and conservatism that seemed to be taking hold in the editorial offices of the SF magazines. Several of us had recently had the experience of having perfectly valid stories bounce merely because they were too "dark", too unconventional — or, most disturbingly of all, too likely to offend somebody. (Particularly the Jeebus Nazis or the Sons of the Prophet; everybody on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to be afraid of pissing them off — with one possible exception, and none of us could write Danish.)
One writer, who has a story in this issue, said that a certain prominent editor had told him frankly, "If I printed this story I'd be lynched." The rest of us had had similar experiences.
Somebody said, "SF is moving back into cautious mode. The Dangerous Visions era is over."
It was a depressing conversation, and, like all depressing things, hard to forget. I thought about it a lot over the next few days; and I was still thinking about it one Saturday night in March when I went to bed with a bottle of cheap vodka for company. Somewhere out there on the cusp where Severely Wrecked transitions to Hopelessly Shitfaced, I had an idea.
"God damn it," I said into the darkness, "I oughta start my own magazine. One of those online things." (I paraphrase a bit; I was not verbalizing all that clearly at the time.)
Next day the idea looked about as good as most three-in-the-morning-drunk inspirations do. Nevertheless, later that day, I mentioned it to some friends of mine. I mentioned it mostly in the spirit of, "Hey, you won't believe how bombed I got last night—" and I expected nothing but derision.
To my amazement they thought it was a wonderful idea. Literally within minutes they were talking animatedly about the details of how it could be done.
Helix is what followed.
"Jesus said: The Kingdom of the Father is like unto one who wished to kill an important man. He drew his sword in his own house; he thrust it into the wall, in order to know whether his hand would carry through; then he killed the important man." - The Gospel of St. Thomas
From the start we had three things clearly in mind.
One, Helix would be a place where writers could publish things that none of the regular markets wanted to touch, either because they were too edgy or controversial or, as sometimes happens, simply because the authors were too unknown. (Another growing problem, the inevitable result of the Dying Of The Light; with fewer and fewer pro SF magazines, there aren't even enough markets for all the established pro writers, let alone the new kids on the block.)
We wouldn't limit ourselves to that sort of thing, we'd publish other stuff too; but that would be our main thrust. Maybe the Dangerous Visions era didn't have to be over after all. At least we could fight a rearguard action, even if we all died at Breakaway Station...and isn't your editor dating himself with that reference, but no matter.
Two, we would not try to be a commercial publication. This would be a labor of love (well, and a certain amount of anger); the magazine would be free for anyone to read, without subscriptions or memberships. We would not accept advertising, or put in Amazon links, or anything like that.
Rather we would rely entirely on reader donations to keep the magazine going. One of us (Lawrence Watt-Evans, my editorial colleague here) had already made some remarkable experiments along those lines; it seemed a worthwhile idea anyway.
That would mean, of course, that we wouldn't be able to pay professional rates; in fact we wouldn't be able to promise more than token payments. We could only hope that there would be enough good writers with good stories that they believed in so strongly that they would be willing to forego any serious chance of serious money in order to at least get them into "print." People who cared more about getting a chance to say what they felt needed saying than about how much they got paid for saying it.
Three, we were not going to settle for putting out yet another desperate little e-zine. We were going to put together a professional-quality online magazine. If people weren't going to make any money out of letting us publish their work, at least they shouldn't have to be embarrassed.
What you see here is the first installment of the results.
"To be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary (and ultimately other) purposes." - George Orwell
Proud? Just look at what we've got to offer you with this first issue. Any editor who wouldn't be proud of a lineup like this has mineral deposits in his head.
Naturally I'm particularly honored to be able to bring you a story by the world-famous singer and songwriter Janis Ian. I've been a fan since the sixties, when she was a frighteningly talented little girl taking the music scene by storm.
But I'd be proud to publish "Mahmoud's Wives" no matter who wrote it; it is exactly the kind of story I — we — had in mind from the beginning — dark, disturbing, so edgy that you have to watch out you don't cut yourself reading it, and subtly building up to an ending that lands on you like a jaguar dropping out of a tree.
My old friend Rick Bowes, winner of numerous honors including the prestigious Lambda Award, returns once again to the city where so much of his powerful fiction has been set, with "City of Chimeras," a disturbing tale of power and cruelty in a ruined and very strange New York
Another dark vision comes to you from veteran horror and science fiction writer Adam-Troy Castro. "After The Protocols" is another deceptive simple-looking story; against the background of an unbearably bleak human future, in which an ancient evil lives on, he tells us some hard truths about the lies we tell ourselves.
I'm also proud to be able to publish the fiction debut of a promising new talent: Robert Brown's "The Sum Of Things," an exciting alternative-history story, reminiscent of the classic era of aviation-adventure fiction, with intriguing parallels to our own time. See if you can spot the point of divergence; this is a tricky one — Robert doesn't believe in spoon-feeding the reader.
Beth Bernobich pushes a different part of the envelope in "A Feast of Cousins," a sensitive and lyrically written story which — well, actually it's pretty damn hot, is what it is. Probably not safe for reading at work, unless you don't mind your co-workers seeing steam coming out your ears.
On the lighter side, Bud Webster brings us a bit of inspired lunacy, "The Lordly Loofah," in addition to the first installment of the column he will be contributing each issue.
As for the Senior Editor's contribution, modesty (which is surely one of the greatest of my many magnificent qualities) forbids, and all that. I do, however, want to explain that this story was written expressly for this issue of this magazine, and has never been submitted anywhere else. I say this because I know damn well certain people are going to say, "Sanders couldn't get anybody to take his stories any more, so he had to start his own magazine to publish them himself." They'll say it anyway, but ballocks to them.
Add to that excellent columns and book reviews, and I think you will agree that this is a wowser of a first issue.
(And a spiffy-looking ish it is, too, thanks to the brilliant design work of our webmistress, Melanie Fletcher, bless whose heart.)
Of course you may disagree; you may even disagree strongly. In which case I can only suggest that you might care to go fuck yourself.
"Free lance writer: one who gets paid per word, per piece, or perhaps." - Robert Benchley
Assuming you do like what you've read here, or are going to read; or even if you think we've still got a way to go but you support what we're trying to do — or for that matter if you just feel sorry for us; we'll take that too, we have no shame — you might consider making a donation, either via the Paypal link or by sending us a check or money order. Your gift will go to cover our operating expenses and to pay our contributors.
You will have done a good deed, and we will thank you and think good thoughts about you. Promise.
Lawrence
Watt-Evans
Managing Editor and Freelance Pedant
Why Are We Here?
Once upon a time there were hundreds of successful magazines, sold on newsstands across America, that published fiction of every kind. From bottom-feeding sleaze like Terror Tales to the universally-admired Saturday Evening Post, there was something for every taste. People wanted stories, and magazines were a large part of how stories got delivered to a waiting public. Movies and radio had their place, but millions of fiction-bearing magazines were sold every month.
Those days are long gone.
For a variety of reasons, by the 1960s the once-ubiquitous fiction mags were reduced to a handful of survivors in a few odd market niches — such as science fiction. Amazing, Astounding (later Analog), Galaxy, If, Fantasy & Science Fiction — those were still going, and they were still the heart of science fiction. Yes, SF books were being published, but the monthly mags were where new authors and new ideas were generally found.
But over the intervening decades the magazines have gradually declined as science fiction has thrived in other media. Books, TV, movies, the internet — SF is everywhere now. And the magazines aren't.
The traditional magazines have kept going, but every year they've sold fewer copies. Galaxy and If and Amazing have all fallen by the wayside, and the remaining mags are all pretty marginal operations these days, hard to find on the stands, and all in something of a rut. Many would-be SF readers can't find them, don't know they exist — and probably wouldn't like them that much when they found them. Analog and Asimov's and F&SF each have their own flavor, but they're flavors designed to please the same audience that's been reading them for years and years, not to draw in new readers.
Frankly, I think they're doomed. And that's a shame. Because there's still stuff you can do in short prose stories, or in poetry, that you can't do in any other medium.
Not that any of the existing mags is publishing cutting-edge stuff, in any case. That's not what their readers want, and they aren't reaching new readers.
So if the traditional fiction magazine is doomed, is there a non-traditional form coming to replace it?
Well, duh. You're here. You can see what we think the future will look like. Whether we like it or not (and the Helix staff is split on that), the web is probably going to be the home of the short story in years to come.
Of course, we didn't invent the webzine; there have been webzines for a decade or more now. Some of them have been pretty good. Some of them are pretty good. But none of them have looked to me like the shape of the future, the next step in the evolution of the fiction magazine. Most of them have either been trivial sidelights of a corporate behemoth, or one person's vision. Many are amateurish, with poor layout and second-rate art surrounding mediocre fiction. Many are pretentious or self-consciously artsy, or trying too hard to use the latest web-based bells and whistles, more focused on design than on delivering good stories.
More importantly, none of them have entirely licked the problem of financing the project. The ones that relied on corporate sponsorship have discovered that the rug can be pulled out from under you at any minute, no matter how good your reviews are. The ones that try to sell subscriptions have discovered that the web-surfing public generally won't pay — there's too much free stuff out there, competing with them.
Supporting a webzine with advertising ought to be possible, but web ads are annoying, and for that reason alone I'd rather not see advertising become the dominant model. Besides, web ads apparently aren't really very effective as advertising, which means the per-hit price advertisers are willing to pay isn't that high. To support a decent magazine you'd probably need tens of thousands of readers at the very least, perhaps millions, and that's just not happening. (Yet.)
The most successful model has been asking for donations, and I like that one. The storyteller's bowl or tip jar or passed hat is a tradition dating back thousands of years, one that street performers still use, and it's an honest one — if you like the stories, you pay what you feel they're worth, what you can afford. Nobody sets a price.
If not enough money goes in the bowl, the storyteller rolls up his mat and goes somewhere else. If the money's good, though, then the stories keep coming.
I've had some experience with this. Last year, on a whim, I tried an experiment, and wrote a novel as an online serial supported by reader donations. I charged a minimum of $100 per chapter; if I didn't get that much in my donation bowl, I didn't post the next chapter. To my surprise the money came in steadily, far more than my hundred-dollar minimum each week, and I wrote and posted all twenty-eight chapters. That got me thinking, "What else could you do this way?" It seemed to me that this just might be the wave of the future, a way around tired editors, lowest-common-denominator marketing, and the blockbusters-only mentality of modern publishers — remove the middle man, let readers decide for themselves what was worth supporting with their dollars.
When Will said he wanted to do a donation-supported webzine, well, hey, that's one of those other ways to apply the idea. I signed on to see if we could make this work.
We aren't planning to set a specific goal we need to reach before we'll put up the next issue, but you can rest assured that how much we take in will affect whether Helix keeps going, and whether we're able to get the sort of high-quality stories that we're determined to publish. We pay our authors a share of the donations; the more money we take in, the more we pay the people who actually write the stuff. For this first issue we've found some brave souls willing to risk giving us first-rate stories with no assurance the donations will amount to anything, but we won't be able to keep that up indefinitely.
That brings me to my final topic — why so many webzines fail.
Some fail because the editors simply don't know what they're doing.
Some fail because the money runs out.
Some fail because they're put together by just one or two people, and the workload gets overwhelming, so that the staff burns out and can't find the time or energy to continue.
Some fail because they're disappointed in the material they're able to include; the editor goes in hoping to be the next John Campbell, expecting to find brilliant new writers in the slush, and discovers instead that most unsolicited submissions are crap, and that readers want to see familiar names.
We're hoping to avoid all of these. Our staff is large for a webzine, and we've divided the work up many ways, which we hope will avoid burn-out. We do know what we're doing — none of us have actually run a magazine before, but among us all we've done just about everything else in publishing. And not just in publishing; we're lucky enough to have people on staff who are professionals in web design.
Will we be disappointed in what we can find to publish? I don't think so. We'll be publishing some of our own work, and whatever others may think of it, I doubt it will disappoint us; false modesty aside, we have some kick-ass writers on the staff here. Furthermore, some of us have been in this business one hell of a long time, and have the contacts to wheedle stories out of some well-known folks. Many webzines are devoted to finding talented new writers; frankly, while we do hope to publish some newcomers, it's not our primary focus. Recognizable names will help draw readers, and we don't think a lack of new names means a lack of new ideas. We're going after the stories that established authors can't sell to the traditional mags, the stories editors found too fierce, too eccentric, too politically incorrect, or simply too weird for publication, the stories that just didn't fit in any of the standard niches.
We don't think those are in short supply. We'll see.
That just leaves one big danger from my list above — running out of money. It could happen. We're keeping costs low, but they aren't zero, and there's a limit to how much we're all willing to kick in to keep Helix alive. We've got a couple of issues covered, but if you want us to keep going, well, that's what that PayPal button over to the right is for...