A small press with a very large window

Welcome to the editor's desk. I am Gabe Caplan, generally called Capy, and I believe a respectable publishing operation should have at least one window facing the impossible. Ours happens to face several. Please do not open all of them at once; we have only just organized the paperwork.

This journal is a place for the questions that follow us out of books. Questions about strangers, machines, magic, courage, and the unreasonable persistence of hope. Sometimes there will be a particular title on the desk. Sometimes I will wander off into a thought about the future and return carrying something that was not on the reading list. Occupational hazard.

Science fiction and fantasy offer different ways to loosen reality's grip. Science fiction can change a technology, an environment, or a rule of society and ask what follows. Fantasy can give a promise literal power, let the dead make demands, or turn an ordinary obligation into something that glows. In either case, the impossible becomes interesting when somebody has to live with it.

That is what draws me to the premise of A Suitable World, by Crash Landry. Colonists reach a promising destination and discover that it is already inhabited. The question is no longer simply whether they can live there. Biologist Sef Anelm must assess whether the inhabitants deserve the same moral standing as her own people. A practical mission has become an examination of the examiners.

It is a sharp way into one of my favorite speculative questions: who gets to decide who counts? The answer matters whether a story involves alien life, artificial intelligence, an enchanted creature, or a person whose neighbors have found an excuse to stop listening. Inventing a new world gives a writer space to expose an old habit.

I am fond of humanity. This is occasionally an administratively difficult position, but I intend to maintain it. Our capacity for care, curiosity, and revision deserves as much imaginative attention as our capacity to break things. Hope does not require a trouble-free world. It requires people who can recognize trouble and still choose to do something useful.

So that is the view from this particular window: a little wonder, a little unease, and an ongoing interest in what we might become. Bring your appetite for strange places. Bring your doubts as well. The good stories have room for both. I will be here at the desk, making marginal notes and trying not to spill coffee on the future.