Bewildering Stories News

By the Numbers

This issue’s index presents a dizzying array of numbers: 1, II, III, 4, V and 6. What an achievement: we can count most of our fingers in Roman and Arabic numerals at the same time.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that our use of number styles is not always consistent. True, it isn’t, but we don’t worry about it. We follow the authors’ preferences; for example: Tala Bar uses “chapter 6, part III” while euhal allen uses “part V,” and previous issues have used things like “part 1.”

What’s the difference between a “chapter” and a “part”? Little or none. If the author says “chapter,” that’s what we put; otherwise we use “part.” Strictly speaking, though, the gradation from largest to smallest is: chapter, part, installment, and section. That’s about as fine as anyone wants to slice things.

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I’m sure most readers don’t pay much attention to all the bookkeeping. If you’re like me, you go “author, title, click.” But I also think our regular readers would find the serial titles rather bare without the numbers, and it seems vaguely reassuring to know where a title stands in its own order. Speaking of which, I can divulge a little secret: “6” and “V” mean that Gaia and “The Bridge,” respectively, are on about the 25-yard line.

True, newcomers may think, “Oh woe, I’m six chapters behind!” Hah! That’s not the half of it. When they tremblingly open “gaia6.2.2.html,” they’re in for a real shock: Gaia has been with us for 22 issues. With 32 installments to date, it will easily surpass Cyrano’s 39.

Gaia will thus hold the record as the longest work ever published in Bewildering Stories. It joins a very good company with Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s Made It Way Up, Julian Lawler’s The Prophet of Dreams and, of course, Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Voyage to the Moon. We are very proud to be able to give those works a home on the Internet.

The only reason we haven’t added Gaia and Made It Way Up to our Special Features section is that the novels are already indexed in Tala Bar’s and Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s respective bibliographies. The four titles listed in Special Features have been put there because they are not indexed anywhere else.

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Have you ever wondered about serials and the role of double installments? We like serials; we think they keep readers coming back. But sometimes a semi-serial is called for. In this issue, Omar Vega’s “The Coke Maker” is a serial, while Joel Gn’s “Mindfield” and Bob Sorensen’s “Call Waiting” have two simultaneous installments, instead.

If a story exceeds about 3,000 words, we normally split it into roughly equal installments, with allowances for dramatic turning points. If “Mindfield” and “Call Waiting” were longer, we’d have to serialize them. But the stories’ content and structure make it better not to. “The Coke Maker” is linear in composition — practically a film script — whereas “Mindfield” and “Call Waiting” have a much more interior focus.

Might we have doubled up the “Coke Maker” installments? Sure, if they were only about 2,000 words each and the two other short stories didn’t have priority on simultaneous installments. Can we have more than two installments in one issue? Tala Bar’s “Sibyl” has three in issue 87, and Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s Made It Way Up has four in issue 96. I’ll spare you an explanation; you’re probably glazed enough as it is. Suffice it say that we go by the numbers.

Stick with us and you’ll be balancing your bank account in Roman numerals yet!