Just what the world needs, right? Another journal. Well, we happen to think that there are some pretty good reasons for setting this venture up. Critical material on Pynchon continues to proliferate. There have been three print collections published in the past year and a half alone, with no signs of slowdown. Communities of readers and scholars brought together by the web (and indeed more corporeal methods) are developing and mutating. Databases, blogs and various collective knowledge projects

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... add layer upon layer to an already complex picture. In recent years, 'International Pynchon Week' has touched down in Valetta, Munich and Lublin. In 2013, a further conference will be held in Durham, neatly coinciding with the 50th anniversary of V. and the 250th anniversary of Mason and Dixon's arrival on American shores. We are also still coming to terms with a series of major events in the Pynchonosphere -the hot-off-the-press announcement that Pynchon's entire back catalogue is now available in digital form; the much-debated narration used to promote 2009's Inherent Vice; the news that this latest novel might be adapted for the big screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. As Pynchon writes in his essay on Luddism (which holds up to scrutiny very well after almost thirty years), "all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle." The heroically rigorous Pynchon Notes, of course, has provided a long-standing service to the field and will continue to do so. We have benefited immensely from the expertise, insight and decency that have come to define Pynchon Notes and we have been inspired by its remarkably high standards. With the ground shifting beneath our feet, however, Orbit attempts to do some new and distinct things for our area of scholarship. Firstly, a journal like Orbit helps to avert the phenomenon known as the Serials Crisis. These words capture some tough issues that affect and implicate us all in one way or another. Since 1986, for example, the UK Consumer Price Index has risen, in terms of inflation, by 80.1%. The amount that libraries have to spend, however, on journal subscriptions has risen by 380%. In these times of financial hardship for higher education, we must do everything we can to ensure that our own publication practices do not harm our institutions and friends. Open Access publishing, using the power of the internet to distribute peer-reviewed work at no cost to the reader, mitigates against