Comrades!

July has been a month of crashes -- first the Northern Ireland Peace Process, then John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, and finally the Turtle's own website have all plunged in flames from out of the clear sky. The Turtle, however, has managed to overcome, and has migrated to a new and more stable summer dacha, from which we hope to be able to serve up web pages without further pain or complication. Our apologies to the thousands who have been unable to reach our site, and who haven't completely given up on us in the meantime.

Pleasingly, however, the Crash of the Turtle doesn't seem to have cramped our style or impeded our march towards the total domination of cyberspace. Our mailing list has swollen by almost a fifth in the last month, and now heaves with the names of new Subscribers to the Turtle; more and more websites are linking themselves to The Voice of the Turtle, the Fabian Society, being only the most illustrious; and we continue to add fresh content on an almost-regular basis.

Summer, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, wouldn't be summer without Festivals. We've had Glastonbury, we've had a riotous Woodstock III, and, to cap it all, we now look forward to the delicious insurrection that will be the Turtle's Summer Books Festival. A large team of scribes is hard at work on a Special One-Off Book Review Supplement, which will be published in one fell swoop in the middle of the month. It's not too late to join in, either -- send your contribution to Chris by August 10 and make your Voice heard! Pithy one paragraph efforts are not too short for our "Short and Opinionated Comments" section, and it is worth remembering that even the barest outline of a review can be turned into fully fledged TurtleProse, through the wonders of our in-house Turtle-O-Matic editing device.

New article material has also made its debut in July. We're pleased to welcome into our stable of contributing Comrades Turtle Peter Lowe, to bolster the Turtle's Durham Cultural Studies Phalanx. He has elegantly distilled the liquor of the bitter divide between Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas on the meaning of the 'post' in postmodernism, and this saves you, the reader, from feeling that you have to trawl through their insufferable prose yourself. We've also been sent a Letter From Harare by our Editor-in-the-Field Raj, who, having visited the land of Comrades Mugabe and Banana, has written on the struggles against racism and sexism which women have had, and continue, to face under Rhodesian and Zimbabwean law.

Two important Chelonian Innovations have burst onto the scene this month, too. First, we celebrate the return of The Turtle Salutes...! In its paper incarnation, the Turtle always managed to fill up the inside back cover by Enthusing Uncritically over its favourite hero/ines of the moment, and we are proud to bring back the institution for the Cyberspace Didactic Machine Tool, heaping praise on those who struggle for the soul of California's embattled KPFA community radio station.

We have also begun the process of creating a Library of the Turtle, by depositing the full text of The Manifesto of the Communist Party on the site, together with the Prefaces of 1872, 1882, 1883, 1888 and 1890, in ten beautiful TurtleFormatted pages.

The other Parts of the Turtle continue to flourish. There is a smattering of new articles in the Dictionary, which ticks over nicely. The Fund of Popular Knowledge that is the Adage Archive attached to the Permanent Revolutionary Slogan Generator is also mushrooming -- it is only to be regretted that the Permanent Revolutionary Slogan Generator itself has had to be disconnected for the time being. We celebrated Bastille Day by adding a dozen new French Revolutionary slogans, 1789-1968, but then removed two of them for being indefensibly bloodthirsty. (If anyone can supply us with remarks by Saint-Just which are not utterly horrible, we will be pleased to put them in the archive). We also have a growing collection of stirring observations from the first decade of Fabian pamphleteering, as well, which means that we now possess more than fifty Front Page Soundbites in our capacious memory banks. And our links page also slowly evolves. One new link we're proud to recommend connects to the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, which not only campaigns to save the lives of tens of thousands of our favourite Marine Reptiles, but also agitates against the cruel policies of the World Trade Organisation which endanger their survival.

Finally: our usual plea. The Voice of Turtle, as you know, sings for the people. We all love to listen to arias from our favourite, familiar Turtle authors, of course, but above all the people want to hear new Voices and to learn new songs. When the Community of the Turtle falls silent, all that can too often be heard are the Editors of the Turtle grinding out their hoarse duet. It is never too soon to interrupt that duet, and to replace it with what we hope will become the swelling throng of the Chorus of the Turtle, a multiplicity of voices singing in strange and vibrant harmonies. With more, new and different writers sending us their articles, Book Reviews, Dictionary Entries and diverse literary contributions, the Turtle can only benefit -- as will everyone else who surfs our pages. Send us your contributions, suggestions, recommendations and enthusiasm to prolong our midsummer boom, and we'll do our level best to get it all Turtled and online. Until the next victory --

"Pamberi!" -- which is, of course, the Shona for "Avanti!"

The Editors