This monograph was originally published in the Fogcon program book, March 2011.
ANN VANDERMEER
by Eric Schaller
Something was happening back there at the tail end of the last millennium. And I’m not talking about The Gulf War, McDonald’s opening a franchise in Moscow, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Spice Girls, or even Bill Clinton demonstrating new uses for a cigar. Although all these probably figure in there somewhere. What I am talking about are THE SILVER WEB (1990-2002), CRANK! (1993-1998), CENTURY (1995-2000), and LADY CHURCHILL’S ROSEBUD WRISTLET (1996-date), four magazines that helped define a new course in speculative fiction. Whereas before, most notably in Damon Knight’s ORBIT series, there had been attempts to define science fiction more broadly, so much so that the old guard hesitated to call it science fiction, here the editors of these new magazines basically said, “Definitions be damned, we’ll publish whatever gives us that certain feeling we got when we first encountered genre fiction, when it seemed to open a new vista on the world, blew our collective consciousness, so to speak. Oh yeah, and we do care about language, so don’t destroy the waking dream by confusing an adjective with a unicorn.”
I notice that I didn’t mention the name of Ann VanderMeer in the previous paragraph, although her presence suffuses it. Ann was, of course, the editor for THE SILVER WEB, the first of these magazines to see print and the one that cast the broadest net in terms of what you might discover between its covers. Completists please note, the first couple of issues were published under the name of THE STERLING WEB. This quickly morphed into THE SILVER WEB but, reports by CNN pundits to the contrary, this change of name had nothing to do with any confusion brought on by the strange coincidence of Bruce Sterling having coined the term ‘slipstream’ and THE STERLING WEB, being an early proponent of strangeness and the surreal in fiction, having no connection to Bruce Sterling himself. But, back to the matter at hand, in THE SILVER WEB you never quite knew what to expect and this was all to the good. There were the short stories of course, but there were also poems, interviews, and essays. There was rock’n’roll (Ask Ann about her years playing bass with Grandma’s House). And there was the art! Great stuff, printed large, that complemented but did not repeat what was in the stories. I know of no other editor who has cared more about the relationship between art and text. Everything played off of each other to create a unique experience greater than the sum of its parts.