One of the many great things about being a magazine archive (www.huarchive.co) person is that you see, sometimes through editorials and sometimes through the magazine’s actual contents, how contemporary societal events impacted (or didn’t) a particular publication. A Threshold (a long-running magazine from Belfast) editorial from the late 1960s/early 70s wondered/complained about the lack of submissions about The Troubles. Did the conflict not reach the writers that submitted to the magazine, or was there a need to escape from the overwhelming dystopia, the editor wondered. The Honest Ulsterman’s editorial policies toward contemporary society changed as the editor changed, though there was the occasional debate within its pages as to how to deal with for example, the aftermath of Bloody Sunday and other atrocities.  

Abridged, being a post-Troubles publication, though heavily influenced by concepts of fear and violence, has for at least the last decade, explored the interaction of the internet and the ‘real’ world. We saw a time when the real and reality would not necessarily be the same thing. We saw how the frustrations, real and imagined, of the digital crowd would leak into the everyday and that the word (no matter how wild that word is and with somewhat biblical condemnations for those that don’t believe) was the truth. We even had a Control, Alt, Delete trilogy. Our suspicion of nostalgia was articulated in Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun. We had a series of dark goddess issues including Eris that mixed tech-worry with mythos. We, likewise, saw in our Contagion and Relapse issues how fear could be spread by the snake-oil sellers and contaminate even the most clear headed people. We’re not Nostradamus, but it wasn’t hard to see which way the wind was blowing.

For the last couple of years, we’ve noticed the rise of the Irish National Front (for what of a better term) on social media and responded with themes such as From Under The Floorboards and Rebecca and the forthcoming Legion and Don’t Talk To Strangers magazine and pamphlets. We do things subtly, though if things continue as they’re going, there’s a good argument for shouting. We are a political magazine if not a party-political publication. We’re a poetry/art publication so there’s only so much we can do of course. We hope though that Abridged reflects the times. This is kind of ironic (to us at least) as originally the concept was of Abridged as a gothic and exaggerated world, two steps away from reality. It’s probably not a good thing that reality has been twisted so much to be indistinguishable from our Abridged environment.  We don’t preach, but we’ll say again, we don’t like fascists and we think you shouldn’t either.