Guest Blog 5

Gordon Linzner discusses the beginnings of Space and Time.

Origins of the Space and Time Continuum

By Gordon Linzner

Over half a century ago, four high school juniors were sharing, for our personal amusement, comic strips about a character we created named Edgar, along with his friend Alan and pet Poe. We decided to print a collection of these to hand out to fellow classmates.

To this end,

we invested the huge sum of $20 on a used mimeograph machine. The print quality of this device looked far more professional and lasting than the blue-tinted ditto machines commonly used in schools.

For those of you born after the moon landings, to create mimeographed copies one had to work directly on a stencil, which was then attached to an ink-saturated roller. Paper was cranked through and given a few seconds to dry.

Stencil-cutting turned out more difficult than these teenagers expected. Stencils tore easily if you pressed too hard. Ink wouldn’t flow evenly if you didn’t press hard enough. While the more artistic of us worked on that problem, I didn’t want this high-tech equipment to sit idle in my basement.

Typing (pre-electric) provided a more consistent pressure, and we decided as a stop gap to turn out a fiction magazine with a couple simple illustrations. Science fiction, of course.

I’d been writing since first grade, so took over editorial duties (my mother taught me to read at such an early age my kindergarten teacher asked me to read aloud to the class once or twice). We chose the inclusive if not terribly original name Space and Time.

The first issue literally rolled off the press in 1966.

That was fun! Let’s do it again next year! With twice the pages! And get a few classmates to contribute, as well!

By 1968 we discovered photo-offset: faster, cleaner, and not much more expensive. Our third issue was a hybrid, after which the mimeograph was abandoned to its own fate.

My associates soon moved on, though not until we put out four issues of the satirical Edgar magazine. But I was hooked. Word of the magazine’s existence got out. I received contributions from strangers like (to list a handful at random) Darrell Schweitzer, David C. Smith, Charles Saunders, Stephen Bissette, and Frank Miller. I traded with other zines. At one point, to keep S&T purely fiction, I added the review zine Now to Deal with You! which lasted six issues, and another half dozen issues of the satire zine, Uncle Gordon’s Comics and Stories.

Originally I ran two or three of my own stories in each issue, under various pseudonyms. Now that I was getting so much publishable material, there was no need. I reached out to other markets with my own work, establishing my own writing career.

(A side note: editing *S&T* taught me more, and faster, about writing than I might otherwise have learned. Seeing where someone else’s work went astray, then recognizing the same flaws in my own work, was invaluable... and humbling. I also learned how to delegate as the need arose for a volunteer staff).

You’d think all this would have been satisfying, but I was still a glutton for punishment. In 1984, with the magazine still going, I started a small press book line.

Time marches on. After forty years, I had to give up the magazine, which turned out for the best. The new owners, Hildy Silverman and, later, Angela Yuriko Smith, not only kept it alive, but taken it places I would not have felt capable of. The book line, after sitting idle too long, was recently turned over to my colleague, Faith L. Justice, who also publishes historical fiction under the name of Raggedy Moon Press.

And I’m told 2022 will mark the initiation of the Linzner Award, honoring the best stories published in the magazine the previous year.

Tell that to that 16-year-old nerd who started it all and he’d laugh in your face. Or just nod as he slowly backed away. He was such a shy child.

For those of you wishing to dive a little deeper:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?25515 you can follow the evolution of the magazine’s cover art. This site is great for looking up tons of sf/fantasy related publications.

https://spaceandtime.net/ Official home of the magazine now. Angela and her staff have taken things technologically far further than I feel capable of myself. Check it out.

https://raggedymoonbooks.com/ This is Faith Justice’s historical book line, but she also now handles S&T’s bookline. Although a separate web page for those isn’t up yet, she can send you a list of titles to track down on Amazon. Ask nicely.

Guest Blog 6

Guest Blog 4

Samjoko Magazine