Diverse Universe

Geoff and I spent more than 12 hours editing issue 17 of Spaced Out's queer SF newsletter yesterday. Well... we didn't actually spend all that time editing, and I tend to get easily distracted so I spent considerably less than him, but we were here working on the newsletter.

It is really more of a small magazine these days, and with our push to free it from the constraints of paper it will become even more so. Printing each issue on paper and posting it out to all the members and other interested parties has become the biggest cost to the club. If we could go completely electronic then we could increase the size, quality, and media forms of the publication. It would also vastly reduce the time it takes to put together each issue. At the moment we spend a terrible amount of time juggling stuff so that it prints up neatly onto pages.

This issue will be a special women's issue. The 7 page lead article is a bit of a coup. We interviewed Melissa Scott via email. She is the award-winning author of Trouble and Her Friends, Dreamships, Shadow Man, Point of Dreams, and many others. She has 21 books under her belt! An amazing achievement!

In the course of assembling the issue we were looking for a picture for the front cover. I didn't think I had drawn any suitable pictures that we haven't already used, so I started fossicking through a whole lot of my old SF magazines. They mostly cover the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. We kinda expected to see lots of the old cliché screaming woman being attacked by bug-eyed monster and being saved by square-jawed blonde Flash Gordon clone. Oddly we were completely wrong. But it was an interesting journey nonetheless, in the course of which we scanned into the computer almost 30 covers featuring women. That is not many considering we looked at maybe 300 or more magazines. I knew that SF had traditionally been a male-dominated field, but it had never occurred to me that the covers reflected that so strongly. I thought for sure that one of the things guys would like on SF mag covers is scantily clad women.

Surprisingly, one of the most liberated covers came from Astounding in the mid-50s. (I've included it here.) And some of the worst were from the 60s.

Incidentally, anybody who is interested can freely access all our issues of Diverse Universe online at http://www.spacedoutinc.org/publications.html. I am pushing to make the annual Solar Spectrum anthologies available free too -- I hate that they cost $$. The rationale for charging for them seems absurd to me. The argument is that it costs money to print them so we need to recoup the costs. When I point out that the online version costs nothing, the response is that if we made the electronic version free nobody would buy the paper one. Does that sound a little circular to anyone else? Anyway, I think I am gradually winning, so expect the anthologies up there soon too.