October 01, 2007Issue 31
Pg. 2
Ray Gun Revival magazine Issue 31, October 01, 2007
Overlords (Founders / Editors):
Johne Cook, L. S. King, Paul Chrisan Glenn
Venerable Staff:
A.M. Sckel
- Managing Copyeditor
Shannon McNear
- Lord High Advisor, grammar consultant, listeningear/sanity saver for Overlord Lee
Paul Chrisan Glenn
- PR, sounding board, strong right hand
L. S. King
- Lord High Editor, proofreader, beloved nag, muse, webmistress
Johne Cook
- art wrangler, desktop publishing, chief cook and bole
washer
Slushmasters (Submissions Editors):
Sco M. Sandridge
John M. WhalenDavid WilhelmsShari L. ArmstrongJack Willard
Serial Authors:
Sean T. M. Sennon
John M. WhalenBen SchumacherLee S. King
Paul Chrisan Glenn
Johne Cook
Cover Art
:
“Starlit Night”
by Je Michelmann
Without Whom...
Bill Snodgrass
, site host,
Web-Net Soluons, admin, webmaster, database admin, mentor, con
-dante, liaison – Double-edged Publishing
Special Thanks:
Ray Gun Revival
logo design by
Ray Gun Revival
Table of Contents
Visit us online at
http://raygunrevival.com
All content copyright 2007 by
Double-edged Publishing
,
a Memphis, Tennessee-based non-prot publisher.
Rev: 20071001c
Pg. 3
Ray Gun Revival magazine Issue 31, October 01, 2007
R
ay Gun Revival magazine wasn’t created
in a vacuum. Each of the founding members came to the endeavor with different expectations, different hopes. I knew Paul from his work as an indie film director and member of various music lists that we both frequented. I met Lee at the legendary Deep
Magic e-zine. And, of course, there was the
common fascination with
.Deep Magic was published monthly for four years, and was the publication that
introduced many of us to each other. DM’s
tagline was ‘Safe Places For Minds To
Wander’. We respected the quality of their
product while making a deliberate decision to consistently publish works that an entire family could enjoy.
As we set the foundation for what RGR would
look like, and how we would operate, we very much went to school on the DM model, especially with an eye toward the overall quality of the publication. We have adopted the same model of producing a regular .pdf
zine with stellar cover art, going so far as to
build on their actual cover artist boilerplate. However, we diverge a little in areas that play to our strengths: we publish biweekly instead of monthly, we focus on space opera
instead of fantasy, and we’re a little more
daring than DM.Our target audience skews a little older. However, we try not to flaunt our freedom, and for the most part, our publication is also something that can be enjoyed by an entire family.In this issue, we ran into something that I frankly expected to encounter into far earlier in our run, when language strays over the line,
and how to juggle author’s works as-written
versus editorial preference. Keeping our target audience in mind is a tricky balancing
act, but we’ve had a pretty good run thus far, and I trust you’ll agree that we’ve arrived
at our decision this issue as a result of appropriate discussion and consensus.The ongoing serial work, “The Pasasdena Rule” by Ben Schumacher, is a frank and thrilling look at life out in the wildly exciting and starkly unforgiving vacuum of space. The author, a physics professor, does an artful and compelling job painting the realities of life in an unforgiving environment, and he also gives us a wide spectrum of characters, including those who speak in the colorful fashion that one might experience in such an environment.
At Ray Gun Revival magazine, we take salty
language on a case-by-case basis. It appears sometimes in our own works out of a sense of being true to the various characters we
employ. It doesn’t mean that the author
endorses the speech or behavior of a character when it occurs, simply that the character in question uses that mode of speech. By the same token, it does not mean
that RGR endorses such things, either.
We do, however, endorse good writing, and
Ben Schumacher’s work is good writing of a sort we don’t often see at RGR. His is the closest thing we’ve gotten to harder sci-
fi, but the characters are so accessible and the situation so taut that we jumped at the chance to feature his work. In this issue, a couple of the characters use language that may be offensive to people of the Judeo-Christian faith. As language, it is nothing
that many of us don’t hear commonly or
frequently, and yet perhaps we wish that we never did have to hear or read it, and we respect that as Editors. In fact, one of our number raised an immediate concern, the sort of concern that was at least latent in the other two. That sort of language crossed a line for them, and that left the collective Overlords with a challenge. We assembled the three of us and addressed the issue between us. Two of us were of an opinion that the language of a
character doesn’t necessarily reflect on the author, and certainly doesn’t represent us
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