calimac

When I started reading it, Locus really was the newsletter of the science fiction field. It didn't cover the more ephemeral fannish doings, but it dealt with the people of the field as much as with their professional activities. It was, as PNH puts it, the neighborhood newspaper.

Gradually it evolved into a magazine specifically about SF publishing, which it covers very well; and it simultaneously evolved into something called a semiprozine, a Hugo category invented mostly as a place to put Locus.

I administered the Hugo Awards the first year that Locus failed to win in all the years that Best Semiprozine had been in existence. "I knew this would happen eventually," said Charles N. Brown, its editor, to me philosophically after the ceremony as I handed him a diskette with the Hugo result statistics (and oh, did we ever think we were being really hi-tech about it).

Locus has been off-and-on, mostly on, in Hugo winnings since then, and it continues to be the Publishers Weekly (except that it's monthly) of the field, and it will continue on without him. Which is as Charles wanted it: he'd long since given the hands-on operations of the magazine to others, partly in anticipation of this; and no true SF fan would call a halt to the future on the petty grounds of the cessation of his mortal body.

But I like to remember Locus as it was in the wayback, when Charles and his then-wife Dena were running it by themselves, when it was just a few folded, unstapled bedsheets of white paper* without even any photos, when every editorial began, "Well, this issue is late again," and when tiny news items carried sparkling headlines, like the one about the impending closing of a famous anthology series, headed "Orbit Decays."

*I know, some can remember even further back than that.