Timewaster's Guide Archive

Those of you who worked on Leading Edge (BYU’s science fiction and fantasy magazine, for those who didn’t) know that there’s always been a tension between us and the English Department, most of it riding on the fact that some in the administration don’t consider SF&F literary enough to merit English Department support. Well, over recent years our support base has been eroding, with such longtime supporters as Doc Smith, Sally Taylor, and Linda Adams retiring or, in Doc’s case, dying. And all of that finally came to a head.

Sometime near the beginning of this semester, the English Department administration decided that they would no longer support Leading Edge. We don’t know exactly when this took place, as they informed neither us nor our advisor (Zina Petersen at the moment). In fact, had one of the editors not asked the College of Humanities about the possibility of some extra funding for possible projects, we might not know even now.

The basic reasons for the department’s decision seem to boil down to the following:

1) Several members of the department administration don’t consider SF&F literary enough to merit English Department support, both in terms of funding and our advisor’s time.

2) Leading Edge doesn’t really fit their definition of a student journal because it (a) doesn’t have a class specifically connected to it, (b) publishes largely non-student material, and (c) often has non-students as prominent staff members (such as our current associate editor). They admit we’re an excellent journal; we just don’t “fit” their definition of a student journal deserving of university resources.

I think the reasons are kind of lame, but I’m not the one making the decisions. Anyway, as soon as we found out about the decision (through the College of Humanities, not even the department) we started acting to prevent it, or at least survive the transition. Credit where credit’s due: the vast majority of this was done by Matt Gibbons, our managing editor, and many thanks to him for his hard work.

We tried getting sponsored by the Linguistics department, but for whatever reason they decided not to take us. (The reason I heard was the same about department resources; I don’t agree with that, but it’s what they say.) We tried going directly through the College of Humanities, like Quark and LTUE do, but apparently we still need a department to sponsor us.

(continued next post)