My best example was when I was writing for “Science Fiction Eye”, back about the time its ever-increasing delays was earning it the nickname “The Last Dangerous Magazine”. (As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, comparing “Science Fiction Eye” and _The Last Dangerous Visions_ is potentially libelous: contributors to LDV got PAID.) I finally got tired of waiting 2 1/2 years between issues, tired of much-requested articles and reviews disappearing, and tired of editor/publisher Steve Brown’s never-ending excuses as to why each issue was later than the one before. I quit, and promptly received a threat that “if you leave, I’ll let all of my friends in the science fiction industry know that you’re erratic and undependable.” The direct threat was that my career, such as it was, was dependent upon my coming back.

At that point, I ignored the threat. I figured that quitting an increasingly irrelevant magazine wasn’t going to crater my career, and that the few people that might listen to Brown would be eclipsed by the number of editors who would ask “Science Fiction What?” That held true: one last issue of the magazine came out, a full year after I quit, the magazine shut down entirely in 1999, and Brown didn’t even have the decency to let subscribers know that he was shutting things down. To this day, nearly fifteen years after that last issue, I still get people asking “Do you know how to contact Brown? He still owes me for a full subscription.” (For the record, no, I don’t. If anything, he’s done a really good job at disappearing, and I can only imagine that he’s waiting until everyone’s completely forgotten before he surfaces again.)