WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING - Book review

 Delia Owens’ debut novel has sold millions of copies worldwide and has thousands of reviews on Amazon, so there would seem little point to my adding to the comments. And yet, that’s what I do – review books I’ve read. My main reason is to remind myself of the story. I’ve been making lists of books read since the 1960s (with a break of a few years – 1967-1981) but I must admit that now I cannot recall the storylines of many titles; I only started writing reviews in the 1982 – when I received books from publishers to review for the British Science Fiction Association and also my own small press sci-fi/fantasy magazine Auguries. 

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. ‘Crawdad’ is slang for crayfish; they don’t sing as such but make a sound termed a ‘pulse train’ similar perhaps to Morse Code (my Google search tells me). But what’s the meaning of the book title? ‘Go as far as you can – way out yonder… far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters.’ (p111)

Part mystery, part coming-of-age, the book begins with a prologue in 1969 when a body is found in the marsh of the North Carolina coast: ‘the marsh and sea separated the village from the rest of the world, the only connection being the single-lane highway that limped into town on cracked cement and potholes’ (p16). ‘Mostly, the village seemed tired of arguing with the elements, and simply sagged.’ (p17). Then we jump back in time to 1952 for chapter one: ‘The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh’s moist breath hung the oaks and pines with fog.’ (p5) That first line tells you we’ve got something original here. Lyrical, eloquent and steeped in feeling.Yes, there are aspects that require the reader to suspend disbelief; but this is fiction, after all, and if you’re immersed in the story, you benefit.

The young girl Kya has been abandoned by her mother (domestic abuse; don’t tell the ‘trigger-warning dons!) and lives in a marsh shack with her unreliable father and older brother, Jodie. She does not go to school but learns about nature at first-hand. Oh, she tried school for a day, but nobody took kindly to the ‘marsh girl’: ‘Kya sat down fast in her seat at the back of the room, trying to disappear like a bark beetle blending into the furrowed trunk of an oak.’ (p29)

After Jodie left, Kya went out in the boat with her Pa when the man was lucid. Her Pa introduced her to Jumpin’, an old black man who ran the marine gas station on the wharf. We’re not told she is shy; instead, we get: ‘Kya searched her bare toes but found no words.’ (p64) 

By 1960 she’d grown some, budding into a beguiling beauty. ‘Loneliness had become a natural appendage to Kya, like an arm. Now it grew roots inside her and pressed against her chest.’ (p100)

Her loneliness is assuaged by two boys who become men, but her interactions with most people are minimal. After her father goes away, she has learned to live alone and cope with a little help from Jumpin’ and his good wife.

Looming over her fascinating life story are the flashes forward to 1969 and the mysterious death that might be a murder. And the locals suspect that Kya is responsible for the death. 

It would be unfair to reveal more, save to say that the pages demand to be turned.

The many descriptive passages evoke the place and the person of Kya. The reader can almost feel being there. Besides being a murder mystery, it’s also a love story. Uplifting, poignant, and ultimately surprising. This book deserves its fame.

'Gifts from a dead race' - part 2 of 2

GIFTS FROM A DEAD RACE

Part 2 of 2

 

Nik Morton

 ****

An arm round the old woman's throat, folds of wobbling flesh overlapping his hand, her breath foul in his nostrils, cloying, mixing with body odour. Her damned terrier snarled and snapped at his heels. And she was very much alive, struggling with verve. 'Come on, Paula! For God's sake, where's-?'

            Paula clamped the anaesthetic over nose and mouth and the wrestling slackened then stopped. The woman was now a dead weight in his arms. The dog sensed the change and backed off, mewling, confused, and suddenly afraid.

            They glanced up and down the street. Ill-lit and deserted. They dragged their unwilling patient across the pavement to the waiting ambulance. They all shuffled up the steps and into the back. Paula shut the doors and Rawlings shouted, 'Right, Lindman, get moving!' And he knelt down to check the old woman's breathing and blood-pressure. They christened her Old Minerva, in the superstitious hope that that goddess of the arts and sciences was looking favourably upon them.

****

Beneath the Basement Operating Theatre's glaring hot lights, Rachel lay cold and naked, lifeless and almost boneless.

            Rawlings pulled his eyes away but could not shake off the memories of their marriage. He looked across at Old Minerva's comatose figure, his throat dry. 'Let's hope the old woman's sacrifice will be worth it.'

            This was no longer Rachel, he told himself. Perversely, though he had the choice of corpses, he had picked hers; to give her death some meaning, to be useful, saving life even from the grave? He made deep incisions with the argon-laser knife, the focused beam sealing off blood vessels as it cut.

            All of Rachel's organs and their secretions were analysed and checked. Towards the end, he had to let Paula take over.

            Eleven aching, tiring hours passed. Effectively, they were sealed off from upstairs and the outside world. The result of the autopsy on Rachel Rawlings was now on reams of continuous printout paper, recordings, tabulations and computer-drawn graphs.

            'We'll take a break,' he said, feeding more information into the comparative physiology computer. 'I'll set the alarm for four hours' time. Okay?' Nobody disagreed. 'Then we'll start on Old Minerva.'

            He woke with a splitting headache, stiffness in his shoulder and a leathery mouth. 'The humming's stopped?'

            Lindman spoke. 'I think the hospital's shut down, Doctor...'

            The ceiling-to-floor ventilation was off. He jabbed a light-switch, the tube flickered into brilliant whiteness. At least the standby generators were working...

            'I switched over an hour ago, but let you all sleep.' Paula added, correctly interpreting his concern, 'Old Minerva is all right.'

            'How do you all feel?'

            They smiled, but he didn't miss the purple-rimmed eyes. 'Thermograph's warmed up and ready,' Mosely said.

            'Good.' As the heat camera measured the old woman's infra-red glow, translating the temperature distribution symmetry on a view-screen in varied colours, Rawlings asked Sister Summers, 'How'd the x-rays come out?'

            'Negative, Doctor. A couple of hairline fractures, self-healed. Nothing else.'

            'Nothing here, either,' Paula said, checking the thermograph.

            Rawlings sighed. 'Let's open her up, then.'

****

Lindman handed over another scalpel as the electricity from the Grid returned; the ceiling-to-floor ventilation now gusted like an arctic wind, splashing blood everywhere. 'Mosely, can't you turn the damned thing off?' Rawlings snapped, bracing himself as he performed an awkward excision.

            'I'll try...' Leaving the anaesthetic trolley, she twiddled the theatre console. The airflow decreased to a reasonable down-draught, but now piped music - used as an anaesthetic for low-pain operations - surged in, deafening. Mozart's Jupiter suite. Distraught, Mosely ripped out the wires and the muzak stopped abruptly.

            In the strange silence of snapped tapes, they repeated all the tests they had done on Rachel. A nagging fear was that the disease began in the bones; if so, then they were stymied, for the computer analysis Sister Summers produced revealed there had been nothing organically wrong with Rachel - except that her bones had turned to powder.

            Rawlings suddenly grinned. 'Well, well. Look - a real appendix!'

            Disinterestedly, Paula looked. 'So what?'

            'Remember our argument? If you're practising medicine in 20 years time,' he said, poking at it, 'you'll be lucky to see one of these perishers then!'

            'I suppose so,' Paula conceded, yawning.

            The appendix poked back at his scalpel.

            'More light, Sister!'

            As the lamps were hydraulically lowered, he watched, scrutinising one single section of the vermiform appendage. Fibrous tissue glowed red. But he never blinked; he out-stared it. The appendix moved.

            'It's alive, for God's sake - look!'

            'I am,' Paula answered in a hushed voice. She shook her head, disbelieving. 'But it - it's supposed to be dead - defunct three million years! It can't be functioning...'

            'Quick, we'll take some samples, analyse...' He was trembling, fearful lest his imagination was running away with the exhaustion.

            All the old woman's organs were functioning correctly - and he grudgingly thanked the modern medicine for that. Extensive tests empirically showed that the appendix was no longer defunct but secreting some kind of natural vaccine. Though there was no way of knowing, it seemed probable that the secretion had been triggered by the infection itself.

            'Check Rachel's records, Sister,' said Paula.

            'There's no need,' he interrupted. 'She's got an appendectomy scar. Negative appendix...'

            Paula's tired eyes glistened with tears. 'I think - you were right...'

            He couldn't swallow, staring down at the silly little worm-shape. He recalled his words at the outset - something about God not being able to help...

            For millions of years, it had been lying there, dormant not dead, apparently useless, just waiting for such an eventuality as this terrible plague from space. Fanciful, of course, flavoured with exhaustion and emotion. Instinctively, he felt his abdomen. At least he had managed to keep his own appendix intact, more by accident than by design. Could the new-born of the last three decades say the same? No. Many were doomed to die. Unless...

            Voice tremulous, Paula said, 'We must isolate Old Minerva's appendix secretion.'

            He wondered about her appendix then, hurriedly, added, 'If not, we'll use some of mine. We've got to devise a broad-spectrum antidote.'

****

In the high-streets of the affected world those who had avoided the pandemic space-virus began looting. Military curfews commenced on the evening that Rawlings and Paula isolated the vaccine, identifying its molecular structure so that it could be manufactured.

            The crash of the ground-floor window jerked his head round, cricked his stiff neck.

            'I'll see what's happening,' Lindman offered.

            For four isolated days without let-up, injecting adrenalin and Benzedrine derivatives, he had kept going. Now, with the phial of artificial vaccine by his side, he was close to tears and mental collapse. Hoarsely, he kept saying, 'We did it, Paula - we did it!'

            But she did not answer, was too intent on the doorway. She let out an involuntary gasp, and gripped his shoulder.

            Three armed paramilitary men stood there, one gripping Lindman who was sobbing; her skirt and blouse were torn.

            Tiredly, Rawlings stared, wondering what was happening. 'Who - who are you?' he asked weakly.

            'You're quite cosy here, mate, with all these women, eh?' growled the unshaven leader, his feral eyes glinting. 'In fact,' he spat on the floor, 'you're so sure of yourself, maybe you know something about this plague.' He turned to his mates. 'I reckon I heard you say you did it.'

            'You're mistaken,' Paula said icily, walking towards them. 'Doctor Rawlings has found-'

            The leader's SLR butt crunched into her jaw, sent her reeling into the bench.

            One of the soldiers cheered.

            Still not fully comprehending, his euphoria at their success still hazing his thoughts, Rawlings stepped forward. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. Paula was hurt. Why? 'Paula?' he croaked. And as he manhandled the surprised leader out of the way so he could attend to Paula, bullets punched into him, jerking him into blackness, into oblivion.

            Blood coursed from his ears. Ears that were deaf to the screams of Lindman and Mosely.

            Sister Summers fought in vain while Paula retched in a corner, painfully supporting her broken jaw with bloody hands.

            Forgotten, the phial stood in a rack on the anaesthetic trolley.

* * * * *

Originally published in Auguries magazine, 1984.

Copyright Nik Morton, 2015

GIFTS FROM A DEAD RACE started life as an explanation for the appendix and was first written as a sexier and longer version and was accepted for publication in MEN ONLY, but due to editorial staff changes it never saw the light of day until featured in AUGURIES in this much tamer offering. 

***

If you enjoyed this story, you might like my collection of crime tales, Spanish Eye, published by Crooked Cat (2013), which features 22 cases from Leon Cazador, private eye, ‘in his own words’.  He is also featured in the story ‘Processionary Penitents’ in the Crooked Cat Collection of twenty tales, Crooked Cats’ Tales.

Spanish Eye, released by Crooked Cat Publishing is available as a paperback and as an e-book.

 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanish-Eye-Nik-Morton/dp/1909841315/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1399383023&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Eye-Nik-Morton/dp/1909841315/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1399382967&sr=1-5

 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanish-Eye-Nik-Morton-ebook/dp/B00GXK5C6S/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1399383023&sr=1-4&keywords=nik+morton
 
http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Eye-Nik-Morton-ebook/dp/B00GXK5C6S/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1399382967&sr=1-5&keywords=nik+morton
 
Or you could try my co-authored fantasy novel Wings of the Overlord (by Morton Faulkner) currently available in hardback (5 good glowing reviews):

Floreskand, where myth, mystery and magic reign. The sky above the city of Lornwater darkens as thousands of red tellars, the magnificent birds of the Overlord, wing their way towards dark Arisa. Inexplicably drawn to discover why, the innman Ulran sets out on a quest. Although he prefers to travel alone, he accedes to being accompanied by the ascetic Cobrora Fhord, who seems to harbour a secret or two. Before long, they realise that it's a race against time: they must get to Arisa within seventy days and unlock the secret of the scheduled magical rites. On their way, they stay at the ghostly inn on the shores of dreaded Lake and meet up with the mighty warrior Courdour Alomar. Alomar has his own reasons for going to Arisa and thus is forged an unlikely alliance. Gradually, the trio learn more about each other -- whether it's the strange link Ulran has with the red tellar Scalrin, the lost love of Alomar, or the superstitious heart of Cobrora. Plagued by assassins, forces of nature and magic, the ill-matched threesome must follow their fate across the plains of Floreskand, combat the Baronculer hordes, scale the snow-clad Sonalume Mountains and penetrate the dark heart of Arisa. Only here will they uncover the truth. Here too they will find pain and death in their struggle against the evil Yip-nef Dom.

Saturday Story - 'Works Wonders'

                             WORKS WONDERS

 

Nik Morton

 

This very short story was published in my magazine Auguries in 1989 and came about as a result of a writing theme in the Lee-on-the-Solent writers’ circle - Thaumaturge.

It is an excerpt from a sequence in the fantasy novel Wings of the Overlord, to be published by Knox Robinson this month. 

 

‘What urge?’ the boy asked.

            ‘Thau-mat-urge,’ old An-sep repeated, his parchment face creasing in amusement as he leaned over the rough-hewn Palace garden wall. ‘A worker of wonders.’

            ‘So you're a miracle-man, a - a magician, is that it?’ the child observed, brightly.  ‘Like Por-al Row in the Annals of Lornwater?’

            A frown summoned up a strange, almost other-worldly throaty sound.  ‘Well, sort of, only I'm a little more consistent with my spells.’  The lad shrank away slightly, biting his lower lip.  ‘But I follow the Path of Light, unlike poor Por...’

            This hasty exposal tended to mollify the boy.  Inevitably, he demanded, ‘Do me a spell, then, old mage, if I'm to believe you!’  His tone was imperious, as it should be, An-sep supposed: the boy's blood was royal, after all. 

            Still, the thaumaturge wondered why he bothered: no amount of patient guidance helped. Once the royal children tasted power, best intentions went to Oblivion...

            At that moment An-sep espied the boy's pregnant mother strolling between the aisles of sekors, flora of the Overlord.  Perhaps it amounted to sacrilege, but he fancied that the sacred flowers' beauty paled beside that of the Queen. She was gracefully adorned in a gold brocade maternity gown, her plaited dark hair trailing behind. 

            There were no attendants in evidence. 

            Queen Mariposa had always been a raven-haired beauty, with shimmering cobalt-blue eyes; but now even at this distance An-sep could detect disquiet in her face: sleep-deprived eyes and a down-turned mouth implied she sorely missed her Lord, whose quest for peace in Floreskand had sent him on a mission to neighbouring Goldalese.

            ‘Well?’ demanded the prince, glaring.

            An-sep shrugged away his concern for the vulnerable-looking woman.  Might as well keep the child happy, he'd be ruler soon enough!  Intoning words of Quotamontir, he flourished his hands aloft and two white doves materialized, flicking their wings as if to shrug off the after-effects of their astral journey. 

            The boy was suitably impressed.

            Warning tremors surged in An-sep's veins. 

            Without thought to the consequences, he scaled the wall and landed in a flurry of robes on Royal greensward.  The prince exclaimed in alarm, for any commoner who so much as bent these blades of grass would be rent by sword-blades: this was the Law. 

            But An-sep's impulse was beyond man-made edicts.

            Queen Mariposa cried out and sank to her knees. 

            Dragging the boy with him, An-sep ran over the divine flower-bed.  He kneeled in  obeisance and then gently lowered the queen to the grass. 

            His gnarled cool finger on her head uncreased the brow and the pain seemed to flow out of her. 

            Her boy prince was trembling, eyes starting at sight of the baby emerging into the world.

            The baby cried with healthy gusto. 

            The young prince cried too, as he cradled his new brother and held him to his mother's smiling lips.

            ‘By your leave.’ An-sep stood, bowed and walked the way he had come.

            And in his wake the flowers and grass so recently trampled upon now resumed their natural posture as if he had never trespassed. 

            ‘Now that's a miracle, Thaumaturge!’ the prince shouted, drying his eyes.

            ‘No, young prince,’ An-sep called back, ‘the real miracle is the life you hold in your arms.’

 

***

 Wings of the Overlord can be pre-ordered now:

 

Amazon UK here

 

Amazon COM here

 

Knox Robinson here

Faceless rule-makers

Yesterday’s post about Facebook’s abysmal security algorithm prompts thoughts about the power of faceless rule-makers and how they deploy that power.  Lest we forget, computer applications are designed by humans, who are as prone as the next person to commit errors.

Whether it’s a computer, an in-car system or a game on a tablet, it cannot have been tested in every conceivable scenario. I recall some years back seeing the standard message on computers, along these lines – ‘You have committed an illegal action.’ Which definitely alarmed law-abiding new users, who worried about what they’d done… This is typical of some programmers – too lazy to program and test for all eventualities, they let the conditional options drop through a number of possible messages and then throw in a catch-all – ‘illegal alert!’ – to capture any other unforeseen route a user might go down.

It’s the English language being misused: illegal in my dictionary says it’s something that’s contrary to or for bidden by law. The last time I looked, computer programmers didn’t make law – they make rules. The same goes for android and robots used with regard to tablets and apps. Android is an automaton resembling a human being; robot was invented by Karel Capek in his story ‘R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots’ and derives from the Polish, Ukrainian robota, forced labour, and Russian, robota, work. Early twentieth century definition now accepts that it can be a machine that carries out a variety of tasks automatically or with a minimum of external impulse (such as factory robots); that’s still a big leap from software applications.

Are the individuals who label these applications so devoid of imagination that they must steal an existing term for their jargon? Ask any sci-fi writer and he or she would probably come up with something appropriate. I realise that it’s academic my discussing this, when you consider that for the Windows operating system you have to click on ‘Start’ to log off (which was removed, sensibly, but the clamour from old users has demanded its return, a yearning for the familiar).

I digress. Consider two new ideas being bandied about of late – driverless cars and driverless lorry convoys!

We’re slowly blindly going down that path that was trodden decades before the Terminator movies were thought of, be assured.

If users become dependent on all these applications, then when they go wrong, as they do and will continue to do so, the resultant responses will be anger without management, frustration, and a tendency to rebel – whether as a hacker, a troll or in a more personal manner. It’s the stuff of science fiction. Harlan Ellison’s ‘ “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman’ was about nonconformity being a felony, as well as being a moral tale. Sci-fi authors extrapolate current trends to see where it might lead. Jim England’s story ‘The Globe’ (published in Auguries #6, 1987 is about, among other things, litter louts being zapped by a surveillance stun-gun. And the late Bob Jenkins published a short story ‘No Fire Without Smoke’ (published in Adlib, 1985, reprinted Portsmouth Post, 2007) that casts cigarette smokers as public enemies, liable to be incarcerated or even shot…

'The Globe', 1987

 

The point – faceless rule-makers, if allowed, can take us down a road of unintended and even unperceived consequences.

Back to normal tomorrow…

 

Why do you use a pen name?

I’ve been asked that over the years, as, doubtless, have many other authors who fall into that category. There are reasons.

Let me start by pointing out that my real name is Robert William Nicholson-Morton (no secret, it's on my website). Yes, quite a mouthful. When cheques were the normal form of payment, I hated signing them with that name – more like a squiggle. In truth, I hated signing cheques anyway!

When I joined the Royal Navy, my name-tally ended up as R.W.N-Morton. Having a double-barrelled name had its amusing side. When I appeared for duty one evening, the Leading Hand called out ‘Morton’ and I answered, ‘Here!’ Then he called out ‘Nicholson!’ So I said, ‘Here!’ I quickly added, ‘But I don’t want two jobs.’ Inevitably, in true forces spirit, I had to have a nickname. I became ‘Nik’ – I insisted on dropping the ‘c’ so I could sign my cartoons that way. (I thought there couldn’t be another Nik Morton around – and there wasn’t for some years, but now there is, and he’s a distinguished doctor in UK! But I got there first.)

That’s one reason to opt for a pen name; you’ve either got a common or familiar name or your name is already on the covers of published books. And although it doesn’t deter some authors, a long name is harder to fit onto a cover than a shorter snappier one.

I digress.

Way back in 1971, when I first started submitting short stories and articles, I wrote as Platen Syder. Being in the RN, I felt it prudent in case I ended up having some possibly controversial piece published. (I’d slightly adapted the name of someone I’d signed-up to join the Navy in Gosport, Platten Syder, who now lives in Truro, UK). Despite the name being in front of them, some magazine sub editors managed to give me the byline Playten Syder!

 

By the time I was publishing the magazine Auguries (http://auguries-magazine.blogspot.com.es/), I was using Nik Morton. (When courting my wife-to-be Jennifer, she knew me only as ‘Nik’ for a short while, and to this day I am still Nik to virtually everyone. Schizophrenic, who me?)

When I ran book reviews in my magazine, I had a small stable of reviewers; but the volume of books meant there were still too many for them to cope with. So I reviewed some books under the names Maggie Weaver, Nicola Williams as well as Nik Morton, to avoid the name monotony!

Eventually, after many years, my first novel acceptance was Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton, in 2007. Within a month or so afterwards, I wrote my first western and felt it should be under a different brand, so Ross Morton was invented. Ross was my late mother’s maiden name. Bear in mind that this was in the traditional publishing arena, where genre branding is considered important. The reasons for this are manifold: readers’ expectations possibly top the publishers’ list. If a reader buys a Nik Morton book, they expect it to be a crime novel. This is a little nonsensical if the cover and blurb of the book stated the story was a western, or a science fiction dystopian novel, surely? Nik Morton is considered a ‘brand’, in effect.

So quite a number of authors over the years have adopted pen names to get out of the ‘brand’ straitjacket – Ruth Rendell became Barbara Vine, for example, and recently J.K. Rowling hid behind Robert Galbraith for The Cuckoo’s Calling, perhaps because she felt she’d never get a dispassionate review as herself. Years ago, Doris Lessing did something similar with the pen name Jane Somers for two books. And yet there are exceptions, of course; she also successfully switched genre from ‘mainstream’ to science fiction with her Canopus in Argos sequence, eschewing a pen name; perhaps the success of her remarkable dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor helped.  

 

Nowadays, as any reader or writer knows, publishing is changing. There’s a recognition that maybe readers are happy to read an author no matter the genre she or he writes. Of course there will be those who won’t touch a western or a science fiction novel ever – or not again, not after reading a bad one. (You mean, there are no bad detective, mystery, romance novels? Fancy that!)

Things have become a little blurred for me and my pen name usage. I was commissioned to write a western, chose the title, Bullets for a Ballot, but then baulked at the byline – Nik Morton or Ross Morton. The publisher had published my short stories as Nik Morton, and that was the name most familiar to a US readership, so I clouded the issue and settled on Nik Morton!

I have a horror-crime-romance cross-over novel written as Robert Morton – Death is Another Life. My science fiction and horror short stories were published as both Platen Syder (or Playten Syder!) and Nik Morton, so the confusion persists.

Should a writer use a pen name, then? It’s his or her decision. There’s a great deal of excellent advice and background material on pen names to be found in the blog of Kristine Kathryn Rusch (former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an incredibly prolific writer in several genres); just one instance: she wrote the popular novelization of The Tenth Kingdom as Kathryn Wesley. Her blog is: http://kriswrites.com/2013/10/02/the-business-rusch-pen-names/

 

 

 

 

Auguries magazine

For the last few days I've been scanning images and building up text and finally have loaded a new blog dedicated to a science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine called Auguries which I edited and published between 1983 and 1994. I did it purely to encourage new writers and latterly artists; most issues were produced before the advent of the home computer, though Amstrad had an influence in the early 90s; it was in the days before the internet and publishing packages. Sadly it died due to the cost of printing and paper and the lack of that most precious commodity, time. Maybe the future for new magazines is POD via Lulu or similar.