That's the personnel of STARGATE ATLANTIS you see portrayed above, in case you don't recognize a single one of them from the caricaturist's art.  As you may have noticed, they get faced with some big problems, but they always find a way to get it worked out; if Rodney doesn't come up with an answer, somebody else does.  Like them, we can work out the problems involved in putting up a netzine, which is why I have chosen this particular group representation of our staff for this issue.

     Following the Anniversary Issue, it's appropriate to take an inventory of the past of this book, and its accomplishments, successes and failures.  Well, we failed to “poison people's minds with new thoughts”, but we weren't trying to be poisonous.  We didn't “subjugate the universe” with it, or there'd be a picture of us being Flash Gordon and his crew, to recall FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE.  But we don't want to conquer or subjugate anything, just talk about it.  What we don't have is pretty evident, but what we do have is something, and I think that can be tallied up.

     Since first presenting Surprising, we've been mentioned in an IASFM blurb, advertised in all the Big Three, advertised in FANDOM DIRECTORY, and indexed adequately on all of the major search engines.  Our cover has been viewable at e-fanzines dot com (I notice the word “fanzine” gets past a spell-check), where each new issue continues to be announced, and we're linked from Bewildering, Better Fiction, the Galaxy Museum, and Locus Online's links portal, among others, as well as being made an Associated Publication at Better Fiction.  We average four new   web contributions per issue, and advertise from most independent science fiction forums.  We're available from the DCWI site page, which will be impressive to local readers—hey, to everybody!  We provide good links to numerous of our contributors and by and large have established a place for ourselves within the web.  So that's successful at being established and known.  Visited?  I happen to know we do all right at that, too; we're getting a lot of visits from SciFi's boards, for example.  No, we're not getting a lot of comments; that's one way we aren't being successful, though that might be called a success, too, in its way. And we haven't crashed once since establishing this online read.

     For the rest, look it over, it's a pretty much typo-free read.  Every once in awhile there's a debatable usage, such as upper-case or lower-case considerations or syntax experimentations, but that just proves you can't win ‘em all.  Our format's been called in question by a raving maniac or two, but others have complimented us on it, and those are the ones we listen to.  Eftsoons the Day of Judgment wouldn't call it perfect, but then, they wouldn't call Euclid perfect either.

     As for what we have in it, I think that what we have presented would qualify Surprising as a magazine.  Look at all the new series characters we have introduced—Prell the Guardsman, the villainous Spiral Neb, Radon the Pterodactyloid Man, Rip Walton, Arnold Arliggen, Master Reh-Kab, and, in this issue, the modern Saint George.  You've seen writers not to be found elsewhere—Deep Bora, Kimdell Ingel, Mizor and Tarantulas—and others who've been seen in the news-stand magazines, the likes of P. M. Fergusson, Lou Antonelli, Chester Cuthbert, and Richard Geis.  Provided there is a future, you may be seeing some of the names you have been reading here in it, to paraphrase Captain Adama.  Touchy new  themes that are seldom touched?  Steve Sneyd's “To Die on Eden”, Robert David Anderson's “Bloodbrothers”, Herbert Jerry Baker's “Year 4891”,  Lawrence Dagstine's “A Sad Day for Astronauts”,  M. F. Korn's “The Man Who Loved in Light Years”, Varda One's “The Search for Human Beings”, Joanne Tolson's “Ghost Writer”, and many others.  People who have read these stories will say that it is not easy to forget the experience of reading them.

     Stories of the forbidden that will stun you?  Like a heavy weight dropped on you in the darkness, read Baker's “Valare”, Dagstine's “Efrim 7”, Deadwood's “The Omega and the Damned”,  Dellova's “The Haunted Pond”, Gillard's “The Last of the Languagers”,  Thomas R. Johnson's “Vengeance”,  Albert Manachino's “Children of the Plague”, Seth Pollard's “A Pythoness of the Dark”, Sanhueza's “Bogey Man”, Swallow's “The Copy”, or Joanne Tolson's “Satan's Pawns”, or try out “Dark Mitosis” in this issue.  There's plenty of avant-garde work, too—you look to Kevin Ahearn, M. F. Korn, Deep Bora or Bryan Nyary for that, or you might find it to be at least part of the writing and attitude in the works of other writers here.  We have humor, too, for those who like to hold onto their ribs and laugh;  there's Antonelli, Kollenberg, Cathy Neumeier, Varda One, Daniel Slaten, A. R. Yngve, and others.  The only thing our stories may be lacking is substance, due to their brevity, but the raw materials of substance are there.  You'll be remembering those stories and making your own substantialities out of them.

     So, all in all, we have here a mag that we may be well satisfied with ourselves, and no one's going to take us down from the realization of that.  We just go ho, haw, when we get a deleterious comment about the magazine that is aimed at our egos.  We have all transcended our egos.

     So, do you likewise.  Take a native joy in our publication (by “native” I mean “innate”, let it tap your inner joys) and live a little while you're surfing the computer; after all, the purpose of surfing is enjoyment, and here you have a chance to do that.  I would be less than honest if I were to say that the magazine is not a good read.  You can see what's in it for yourselves, and I think that you will find very adequate verification for my claims if you have not done so already.

     Our magazine's policy is as good as Gold.