Black Gate

Much of the early buzz among short fiction fans at Worldcon last weekend centered around the announcement that Stanley Schmidt, longtime editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, had announced his retirement on August 29, the day before the con:

I have now been editor of Analog for 34 years, tying or (depending on how you count) slightly exceeding the previous longest-tenure record of John W. Campbell. I still enjoy it thoroughly, but am leaving to pursue a wide range of other interests. Two of the most important of these are doing more of my own writing, and reading Analog purely for the enjoyment of it, which I expect to remain at a high level under Trevor Quachri’s direction.

Stanley Schmidt became editor of Analog in December 1978, succeeding Ben Bova. For most of the 34 years he edited it, Analog remained the top-selling magazine in the field, no small feat.

As momentous as the change is, it’s not wholly unexpected. Declining circulation of the SF titles owned by Dell Magazines (Asimov’s and Analog) over the last two decades have led to successive budget cuts, and there’s some conjecture that those cuts led to the retirement of Gardner Dozois as editor of Asimov’s, after winning a record 15 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor during his 16 years as editor (1988 — 2004).

I have mixed emotions at the end of the Schmidt era. I found Analog, the favorite SF magazine of my youth, largely unreadable under Schmidt. However, Schmidt did discover and promote exciting new talent during his 3+ decades as editor, including Timothy Zahn, Harry Turtledove, Michael F. Flynn, Jerry Oltion, Linda Nagata, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Geoffrey A. Landis, Rajnar Vajra, and many others.

Schmidt made his name in Analog first as a writer. His first publication was the short story “A Flash of Darkness” (Analog, September 1968); his novel The Sins of the Fathers was serialized from November 1973 to January 1974. Ten stories in his “Lifeboat Earth” series appeared between 1976 and 1978. As editor, he was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Editor every year from 1980 through 2006 through 2011. He has never won.

Analog‘s new editor is Trevor Quachri, who has served as Managing Editor at Analog (and editorial assistant of both Asimov’s and Analog) for many years. Analog‘s website, which I created over 15 years ago when I ran the SF Site, is here.

Our homies in Toronto, the almost-too-cool-for-planet-Earth ChiZine Publications, have announced a brand new imprint aimed at the YA market, ChiTeen.

“As a business, you can’t ignore the young adult market,” says co-publisher Brett Alexander Savory. “Over the last decade, writers like Rowling, Gaiman and Collins were consistently on bestseller lists. We’ve been wanting to get into the YA market for a couple of years, and now the timing is right.”

“The timing is right” is sometimes code for “We just couldn’t pass on this great book, so we launched a YA imprint to publish it.” That’s what it looks like to me anyway, as the new imprint already has its first title scheduled for release in spring 2014: The Unlikely But Totally True Adventures of Floating Boy and Anxiety Girl by Paul Tremblay (Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, The Little Sleep) and Stephen Graham Jones (Growing Up Dead in Texas, The Ones That Got Away).

If Savory is co-publisher, our tenuous grasp of the English language leads us to believe there must be at least one more publisher. Turns out there is: Sandra Kasturi, so we tracked her down for a quote too. Caught during delicate international rights negotiations, Kasturi nevertheless gave up the following: “Our editorial style lends itself to young adult fiction. CZP embraces the dark, the bizarre, the unusual. So many teens feel isolated or different and are looking for that outlet. ChiTeen will offer the same dark and weird stories with strong writing that CZP is known for, just with subject matter more suited for a younger audience.”

When not issuing dueling quotes, Kasturi and Savory will serve as ChiTeen’s co-publishers, along with most of the CZP team. They tell us they are currently approaching authors to fill out their 2014 roster. Before you get all excited and dust off that YA masterpiece in your trunk, they are not currently open to un-agented submissions for the new imprint.

We last looked at ChiZine in October (ChiZine Publications’ eBooks Now Available on iTunes Store) and in December 2010 (A Salute to ChiZine Publications). Read more at the ChiZine website.

There’s been a lot of passionate discussion and conjecture recently surrounding the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Apple and several of the world’s largest publishers over alleged price-fixing for e-books. It’s a complicated case, with a lot at stake.

So complicated, in fact, that the judge demanded that attorney Bob Kohn re-submit his 25-page legal brief against the DoJ’s settlement with three publishers in just five pages. Frustrated by the tight page limit, Kohn made legal history by submitting his brief in the form of a comic strip.

His argument — that the settlement harms the public, and Amazon’s aggressive price-setting on e-books is presumed illegal — remains the same in the new brief. But as Publisher’s Weekly observed earlier this week:

His rendering is brilliant — not only is it a not so subtle jab at the court for limiting such a complicated case to five page briefs, as a comic strip, the brief will be widely digestible for the general public who may not have the gumption to plow through a typical legal brief.

Brilliant it may have been, but it didn’t have the impact Kohn was hoping for, as yesterday the judge approved the DOJ’s proposed settlement.

It still makes compelling reading, however. You can read Kohn’s inspired comic brief here.