Monday, July 13, 2009

How poetic

If you've ever looked closely at the covers of newly released periodicals, you may have noticed magazines' curious ability to arrive from the future. For SF magazines, at least, that seems fitting.

And so the Analog that just arrived in my mailbox is dated October 2009 ...

I'm delighted with this particular exercise in time travel. Why? First, because on prime magazine real estate, immediately following Stan Schmidt's editorial, I see an astronomy poem --

And July is astronomy month in the year of science.

"Insignificance" deals (as did, in part, the above-referenced post) with how astronomy reshaped humanity's view of the cosmos and our place in it.

Second, because -- although my fiction and science articles appear regularly in Analog -- "Insignificance" makes me a professional poet.

It amuses me to imagine the horrified/mystified expressions this event might bring to the faces of quite a few of my English teachers and professors. Maybe we should add announcement of the apocalypse (or of an ice storm in the infernal regions) to the attributes of the issue :-)

2 comments:

Catreona said...

Excellent, Ed!

I can't even quite find it in my heart to envy you as I ought, since Stan rejected the one poem I was mad or arogant or stupid enough to send him. I'll be looking forward to the october issue, but alas the NLS is no longer timely with such things, and lately I've been lucky to get my Analog and Asimov's halfway through the cover month. So, it will be some time before I can tell you how wonderful your poem actually is. :)

Edward M. Lerner said...

I can wait :-)