Editorial

The Elements of Our Style

LIKE THE WALRUS SAID, the time has come to talk of many things. By this, I mean a subject I’ve been intending to broach for nearly a year. A subject that should be required reading for writers and artists who contribute to our magazine. But I think it will interest the “Perihelion” readership in equal measure. The many things are the elements that comprise this magazine’s style.

Most magazines have a style: a set of editorial guidelines that give a familiar look and feel to text and graphics. Fiction magazines must tread more carefully here among the individual voices of their authors, lest everything sound the same. This is not good for a collection of short stories. It isn’t good for a compilation of articles, either, but non-fiction holds up better under a stronger editorial hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds ...” Although not originally intended for the press, it could certainly apply. Decades ago, when I was just coming up in the ranks, an executive editor for whom I worked liked to quote this phrase on an almost daily basis.

We’ll start with the universal and work down to the specific, then. “Perihelion” is an American science fiction magazine. That is how we are described on Wikipedia. It stands to reason that we publish in the English language. Again, largely in the American variety. It used to be that print magazines based in the U.S. would conform their content to American spelling and grammar as much as possible. The Internet has changed all of that. We get, and accept, as many manuscripts from Canada, the U.K., Australia, and other English-speaking countries as we do from this neck of the planet. Furthermore, we aren’t sold exclusively at newsstands adjacent to NYC subway stations. You can find us on the Internet, and that is truly a global venue. Seems silly to wrangle a story written by a resident of Little Sodbury on the Thames to read like it was penned by a native of Long Island.

There are complications with that. We know that Brits write “colour” and Yanks write “color.” We know that across the pond, the letter Z is often replaced with S. (Or is it vice versa? What came first—the chicken or the egg?) But if we were to attempt an unnecessarily ethnocentric Americanization of everything on our website, we’d undoubtedly miss a few Britishisms, and that would look sloppy, if not ludicrous, or downright arrogant.

Our policy is to run the stories and essays in their original “language” as closely as possible. We proof and edit for accuracy, but we avoid changing the voice. Honestly, I think having a mix of English languages in the magazine looks cool and befits a global community.

Next on our style sheet, we encourage the use of the metric system instead of the outdated imperial system, as far as weights and measures go. All of Earth, except for the U.S., Liberia, and Myanmar, already use the metric system. Science, as far as I know, has always relied upon grams and meters. I studied chemistry in high school and college. You simply can’t make accurate calculations without metric. Figuring out the proper ratios for a one molal solution of hydrochloric acid in ounces would be impossible.

We are all familiar by now with this classic screw-up, as reported by Wikipedia: “The use of two different unit systems was the cause of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998. NASA specified metric units in the contract. NASA and other organizations applied metric units in their work, but one subcontractor, Lockheed Martin, provided thruster performance data to the team in pound force seconds instead of newton seconds. The spacecraft was intended to orbit Mars at about 150 kilometers (93 mi) altitude, but incorrect data probably caused it to descend instead to about 57 kilometers (35 mi), burning up in the Martian atmosphere.”

From a science fiction point of view, it would be laughable to write about a space cruiser docked for repairs in orbit around Pluto and describe distances in feet and miles. We can safely assume, barring the restoration of the Roman Empire, that by the time humans are well and truly a space-faring race, the metric system will be all there is. Extraterrestrials would undoubtedly have a system of weights and measures alien to us humans, but the odds of actually achieving first contact with otherworldly intelligences are, sadly, microscopic.

Could make for an interesting story, however. Getting the conversion wrong from Terran kilograms to Klavernian gortzacs, and having the aliens FedEx a New Jersey-sized lump of nickel straight at us. Talk about a trade deficit!

For the most part, we have adopted the AP Style, which is is a style and usage guide implemented by newspapers and in the news industry throughout the U.S. There is a simple reason for this. AP refers to the Associated Press, the world’s oldest and largest newsgathering organization, that published the first Stylebook back in 1953. I was seven-years-old at the time. Before the decade was over, I’d be stacking sheets of typing paper, folding them in half horizontally, and creating my own magazines, with an assortment of colored pens. My career was already in the making.

After graduating from journalism school, I spent almost forty years at the helm of a variety of magazines. I never worked on a newspaper. Nonetheless, every journal that employed me rigorously followed AP Style. When it came time to revive the long dormant print “Perihelion” as a vibrant online magazine, adopting AP Style was second-nature. I pretty much have it memorized.

We do a few things differently, however. The biggest departure is that, personally, I do not like single quotes. I think they look strange; they stop the flow; with the typeface that we use for the magazine’s body text, single quotes virtually disappear, anyway. In many instances, single quotes can be replaced with double quotes. As quotes within quotes, the primary reason for most single-quote usage, italics look a whole lot better. We also always italicize the names of spaceships, e.g., the Enterprise or the Effervescent Magnitude.

Another rule that I established early on in my career is the importance of having two pairs of eyes proofread every bit of text. No individual is that good. I don’t care how many awards you may have won. I’ve always gotten extremely nervous every time a page of copy was published with only myself having read it. For “Perihelion,” me and Eric Jones (ungrammatical, but it sounds like a song title, and I can’t avoid a good pun) check everything. Eric has a mind like a steel trap, and he has also been known to jump out of perfectly good airplanes in his youth. I am impressed.

Eric keeps me on my toes concerning the subtle difference between “further” and “farther.” Although some linguistic pundits declare that the two words are rapidly becoming interchangeable, Eric is right in his stricter application. On the other hand, these same linguistic pundits, and some dictionaries, allow that the word “since” can be used both as a time stamp and as a synonym for “because.” But here I prefer the stricter usage. I will always change “Since he didn’t drink, he was the designated pilot” to “Because he didn’t drink, he was the designated pilot.”

I will also change any title that begins with “The.” Take a look at our Table of Contents at the left. You will not see a single initial “The” anywhere. This is also a personal aversion of mine, nothing more, but in hindsight I think it gives the magazine character.

Finally, ever wonder why most magazines require that manuscripts be submitted in “standard manuscript format?” This usually means one-inch margins, double-spaced, a Courier-like font, and the title placed well down on the first page.

During the Smith-Corona Era, manuscripts had to be marked up with typsetting instructions for the compositors. This was especially the case when lumbering, noisy Linotype machines ruled the world, and continued to a large degree when cold type overthrew the reigning print shops. (Cold type gave us automatic typewriters which ultimately evolved into word processing software.) Editing instructions were hand-written between the lines. When there wasn’t enough space—let’s say an editor wanted to add a larger amount of text—a caret symbol would indicate the insert point, and the additional text written within the spacious side margins. On the first page, the editor would write the specifications of the body text: font, size, alignment, spacing, width. The headline or title would also be written on the first page with its own accompanying type specs. Thus, sufficiently proofread and marked, the copy would be sent to the compositor.

This isn’t necessary anymore. However, we still prefer standard manuscript format at “Perihelion” because, even on the computer, it is easier to proofread. There is quite a difference between reading for pleasure and reading for publication, at least for me. Old habits die hard. Without my glasses, I’m blind as the proverbial bat. And I’m the Editor. Capital E. Don’t argue with me.

Sam Bellotto Jr.