Dear New Maps Readers,

The Spring 2023 issue of New Maps is out now! Subscribers’ copies have been arriving this week in the U.S., with international subscribers a little ahead or behind depending on the country. If you aren’t subscribed, you can get your copy at the Order page now. On the same page you can also subscribe; if you subscribe before May 15, you’ll get this issue as your first. And the digital version is available now at the New Maps Payhip store.

What’s in it? Well, I suppose we can always hypothesize that there was something in the air — there’s something, anyway, that this issue’s eight stories (written in five countries in four continents) all have in common. In a wide variety of unexpected ways, they all shine their light on something left behind from the past — something from our own time. An opera house, vintage cars, something purported to be oil, a trove of books, a movie projector, an AI mainframe, an internet archive, and something kept secret by a stranger. The items are as different as the ways they’re treated in the future: religiously venerated, fought against by militia, lovingly preserved, thoroughly repurposed, treated with suspicion. All of them, though, meet fates that their creators certainly never foresaw.

Deindustrial fiction awards?

A reader has written in to raise the possibility of an “awards issue” for past stories from New Maps, to give us a chance to give proper respect to the hardworking authors who created them, and so we can remember and talk about them again. See my exchange in the Letters section to find out more. This is a question that could use your input, because the awards, if you’re interested, could also use your input. So write in and let me know how you feel about the possibility, and how it could be done best. How to write in? Well:

Letters for the Summer issue

Whether about the possible awards issue, one of the stories, or something else that you happened to think of, send me letters to the editor: write to editor@new-maps.com by June 20 with your thoughts.

Happy reading,
Nathanael Bonnell Editor, New Maps