A wide-ranging fall issue for your year-end reading

Dear New Maps readers,

The Fall 2022 issue is now available to order! Most subscribers should have just received their copies; if not, look for it in the next few days. If you’re not subscribed, get your paper copy at the order page, or an electronic (PDF) copy at the Payhip store.

This issue ranges over a lot of different territories: from down-home futures in the American Midwest, to a mythical open sea, to middle-of-the-night stories with hallucinatory and even cyberpunk tones. Among all this we find answers to two different questions that we’ll all have to answer sometime:

How do we face the deindustrial future when we’re all alone? An isolated research team in the long Greenlandic night looks for the source of a mysterious disruption to a glacier-preserving project. A mother and daughter far from land receive a strange visitor. A system admin alone in a tower tries to keep the data flowing when a new threat appears. And how do we face it with our communities? Two high-schoolers look for help to create a business for a changed future. A small town’s only optometrist wonders if he’s being replaced when an apprentice turns up. A young man’s disappearance offers a clue important to his whole village.

These stories are joined by columns and letters on the importance of different ways of thinking, new field notes, and more, helping beautifully round out the second year of New Maps.

For 65% of subscribers, it’s renewal time

If you’ve been with New Maps from the start, or your subscription started with the previous winter’s issue, this is the last issue in your subscription. But there’s good news: if you didn’t hear in last issue’s announcement, you can now get an auto-renewing subscription, and you won’t have to remember to renew this time next year. (One-time subscriptions are still available.) Head over to the [order](/order/) page for either one. U.S. subscribers: if you’d like to use the mail system instead of the internet as an experiment in “collapsing now and avoiding the rush,” I’ve made it simple—for readers due to renew, I’ve included a reminder slip with the latest issue; just mail it back in a return-addressed envelope with a check for $48, and you’re done.

The Flesh of Your Future Sticks Between My Teeth

This mouthful, if you haven’t seen it yet, is the title of John Michael Greer’s anthology of winners from his cli-fi parody contest Gristle, which made fun of Grist magazine’s shallow world-is-saved futurism in its “Imagine 2200” contest. It was released earlier this fall by the publisher of New Maps, Looseleaf Publishing, which is to say me, Nathanael Bonnell, in a sole proprietorship. Check out Frank Kaminski’s recent excellent review to find out more about what’s inside, and get your copy at the Looseleaf Publishing website.

Letters and Field Notes

This issue came out a bit later in the seasonal cycle than I planned (it’s a long story, I won’t get into it). But there’s a lot of interesting food for thought in the articles and letters—your letter would look great in the Letters section, so please send it to editor@new-maps.com (subject including “Letter”) by January 5. Our new-ish section, Field Notes, would also be a great place for what you have to say about where we’re at in the process of decline in your neck of the woods. It’s proven a good spot for reader photography as well. Either way, that date is January 5.

Thanks for reading!

Nathanael Bonnell
Editor