Hello and welcome to the fourteenth year of Luna Station Quarterly!
As I was preparing to write this editorial, I was scrounging around for something to talk about that I haven’t touched on before. After over fifty issues, that starts to become a challenge! Yet, I found something that represents, in some way, the last almost decade and a half of publishing LSQ.
I’ve been thinking about the passage of time and my own participation in the ebbs and flows of the clock. As I pondered this idea, I came upon three things that tie up my thoughts into an interesting package. Time is the thread that will carry this editorial to fruition, though I cannot yet see where it will take us, because I am the author. This editorial itself is a journey through time. As you read it, time moves forward on two levels, yours as you read, which is most likely linear, mine as I write, where I bounce around connecting threads and making changes as the theme develops.
Thing one, a context: My particular brand of neurodiversity is marked by a challenged perception of time, which partially means I internally struggle to track how long things last or take to complete. Reminders and alarms ping from my watch regularly to help me stay in sync with the rest of the world, a modern invention to help me manage life in modern times. I often wonder if I would be more or less functional a few hundred years ago, when clocks were rare and the sun helped us all manage our days. I wonder, too, if those in the past asked the same questions I do about their own forebears. Did they also feel as if they were living in the future?
Thing two, a grounding: The title of our lovely cover art this issue is “The Prophet”. A prophet’s power is to see through the veils of time into the future. Through various means, they track the branching paths of the future and tell us which outcome is most likely and what we may do to avoid disaster.
I wonder if those that practice this art are finding their task more difficult as technology and the pace of modern life makes time feel more liquid, at least more so than it did when I was younger. How often have you been in a conversation where someone jokingly said that we’re still somehow living in 2020? I still encounter this “long 2020” phenomenon on occasion, despite that difficult year being three years ago now.
Thing three, a puzzle: My family has been sharing the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) with a friend and we just wrapped up watching the “Loki” series, the main plot of which centers around branching timelines and multiverses. I could say that the series was the seed from which this editorial originated, and yet here it is tucked into the end. Or is it only the end from your perspective? Perhaps I wrote this first, or was that another version of myself in another universe? Which variant are you? Are we all in the same universe or do our choices lead us through companion universes? Did that decision to stop reading this editorial and pour some coffee shift you into the next branch of the timeline? Are you still reading the same editorial when you sat back down?
I leave you with that puzzle, something to noodle on until some version of myself brings you the next issue of LSQ. For now, keep turning these pages and do enjoy the stories within. They’re marvelous as always, written by authors both familiar to our readers and new to the LSQ roster.
Until next time…