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EDITORIAL

SO, WHAT’S IT FOR?

The Edge is a review and comment website and magazine incorporating original fiction. In some ways it’s the magazine I’d like to buy but can’t, because it's not out there.

Film and book reviews that go a bit further than a couple of hundred words telling me whether or not I’d enjoy the items under review (assuming they’re the type of thing I enjoy, assuming I bracket things into ‘types’ and the review is even barely readable). Our reviews are fuller and tell you something about the thing. So rather than 300 words on The Phantom Menace accompanied by shallow interviews with ‘stars’ we have 500 on Love is the Devil.

No gossip pieces on Hollywood fuck-bunnies and stud-muffins. Decent coverage. Long interviews and features. Accessible and intelligent. An entertaining, hopefully, balance of readability and criticism. Entertainment being one of the most important things in the world.

The Edge’s fiction is modern, usually urban, and most of all relevant and evocative, with, I hope, a freshness about it. (This could include a variety of ‘types’.) In the dying days of the 20th century, what Bowie, before his replacement by aliens, called ‘this age of grand delusion’, we need something different to the products of millennium fever and wannabes currently passing for literature. It seems that too few people are attempting to write visionary fiction for the late 1990s; we need new voices, new attempts to describe the shape of the now, to come to terms with the day after tomorrow or our all-too-often fractured inner landscapes. It was M John Harrison (before his own replacement) who defined fiction as ‘precisely the result of a writer’s technique on his/her sensibility’, that ‘a writer’s only duty is to operate truly on his own sensibility, his own viewpoint, with his technique. It’s incumbent on him only to be technically good, and honest in terms of his sensibility and his viewpoint.’ Too many people are caught up in familiar conventions. We don’t have to indulge in these. Marketing by type is useful to book publishers but not to us.

The interesting things are often found on the edge, overlooked in the white noise. The Edge is about things that tap into something deeper. Wising up rather than dumbing down. Every so often a sound, a lyric, an image, a dissonant chord, a pregnant phrase or pause brings waves to the surface. ‘Horror’ and ‘crime’ fiction reflect cultural anxiety and fear, be it of the known or unknown. The furniture of the 'SF' novel is all around us. Eroticism, mainstream, slipstream, we don't care. The best examples reflect or evoke the relationship – almost always involving conflict or tension (hopefully a creative tension) – between our imaginations and the future or the present. The worst examples give way to the temptation to live in the past.

The Edge is for people who read books, watch movies and think about the world and the places they live in, and don’t care whether what they look at has some necrophile marketing label stuck on it or not. For people who like their entertainment a little more sophisticated than the latest on Bill and Monica and their exchanges of cute frog mugs and books with titles like Oy Vey: What They Say, A Guide To Jewish Slang.

Mail order.

The website:
For one reason or another, some extra fiction, interviews and reviews appear here. Most of the material is from out of print issues or old stuff, worth making available in some form, by contributors to the magazine. There is little from available back issues. The site is no longer updated monthly, but it still exists as an online magazine, and stuff is still occasionally added; fiction and interviews as well as new reviews. This is not a way of getting the magazine free! Anything published in the magazine will be held back before appearing here, if it does at all. So, if you like the site, you're missing out on more.

Comments are welcome. Questions are also welcome, but please read About first. •

© 2011 THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.