Queers Destroy Fantasy!

I was honored to be the nonfiction editor for a special issue of Fantasy magazine, part of the ever-growing Destroy series from Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Fantasy — this time, QUEERS DESTROY FANTASY!

The editor-in-fabulousness/fiction editor was Christopher Barzak, the reprints editor was Liz Gorinsky, and the art editor was Henry Lien. Throughout this month, some pieces will be put online. So far, Austin Bunn's magnificent story "Ledge" is now available, as are our various editorial statements. More will be released later, but most of the pieces I commissioned are only available by purchasing the ebook [also available via Weightless] or paperback. There are magnificent pieces by Mary Anne Mohanraj, merritt kopas, Keguro Macharia, Ekaterina Sedia, and Ellen Kushner, and only merritt's "Sleepover Manifesto" will be online.

I owe huge thanks to all the contributors I worked with, to the other editors, to managing editor Wendy Wagner who did lots of unsung work behind the scenes, and to John Joseph Adams, who kindly asked me to join the team.

Jerry Garcia Reads...

A friend sent me the above photo this morning. "You probably know more about Sci Fi and Fantasy publications than anyone I know," he wrote, "so can you possibly identify the book that Jerry Garcia is reading in the attached photo. It would mean a lot to thousands of Deadheads."

I like a challenge. The picture is of such low resolution I almost couldn't make out anything helpful about the book, but I was determined. The title seemed long and the more I stared at it, the more it looked like some sort of anthology title ... The Best something? ... maybe a best of the year collection? ... no, best of fantasy and science -- The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, I bet. I've got a few copies of that longrunning series of stories from the venerable magazine, but all mine are old hardcovers picked up at library sales. I'm not sure I've ever even seen one of the paperbacks, or knew that there were paperbacks of the series. But God invented ISFDB for just such moments. I didn't know which volume of the series this was, but figured if I looked up some of the paperbacks from the 1960s, I might be able to figure it out. I tried the 18th first. No, but the text and layout looked like I was maybe in the vicinity. So I just kept trying.

And there it was. The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 14th Series.

I was particularly amused to see that the ever-wonderful Kit Reed had a story in the book ("Automatic Tiger"). I stuck the info on Facebook and asked her if she'd gotten a fan letter from Jerry. Alas, no. But still, it's nice to find direction around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you.

The Revelator is Now Revealed!

Eric Schaller and I have been working on creating an online version of a magazine some of our ancestors  were involved with in 1876, and after a long period of work, with the brilliant and invaluable help of Luís Rodrigues, THE REVELATOR can now be revealed.

In it you will find two new short stories, "Gaslight" by Jeffrey Ford and "Nick Kaufmann, Last of the Red-Hot Superwhores" by Nick Mamatas; an essay about the relationship between Salem, Massachusetts and witches by Robin DeRosa, poetry by Lillian Aujo and Beverly Nambozo, an interview with and comix by Edward Bolman, an account of The Spleen Brothers by Brian Francis Slattery, paintings by Michaela D'Angelo, and an eyewitness account of the James/Younger gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota -- an account unlike any others, and till now lost in the archives of The Revelator!

A theme of twins, doubles, and doppelgangers runs lightly through this issue of the magazine. It's present in the fiction, there's the idea of historical doubling in Robin's essay on Salem, etc. We got creative with the doubling in the poetry department -- I knew Beverly had a lot of poet friends, and so we asked her to be the commissioning editor for the second poem, and she brought Lillian to us. Never having met Lillian in real life, I don't know if she's Beverly's doppelganger, but I do know we're thrilled to be able to publish the work of both. And of everybody else who was brave enough to want to join the old, weird tradition of The Revelator.

There will probably be future or past issues. Please note though that because of limited resources, we are not open to unsolicited submissions. We would love to get to that point eventually, but right now we just don't have the ability to read through a lot of unsolicited work.

Weird Tales News

You might have heard that Ann VanderMeer was promoted from fiction editor of (the Hugo Award-winning) Weird Tales to editor-in-chief. Ann is smart, brilliantly discriminating, down-to-earth, and practical*, so I've been very curious to see what she would do as editor-in-chief.

Well, now we know. Weird Tales has a revamped website, for one thing. (Writers should note that with that comes a new submission portal -- be sure to read the guidelines before submitting. Payment for fiction has also been raised to 5 cents/word.) And the staff is composed of some great folks in addition to Ann -- the great and glorious Paula Guran is nonfiction editor, the glorious and great Mary Robinette Kowal is art director. Aiding and abetting them are Tessa Kum, Dominik Parisien, and Alan Swirsky as editorial assistants.

I'm tremendously proud to have had a story in Weird Tales, a magazine I've been reading since childhood (astute collectors will find a rather embarrassing letter to the editor by someone bearing my byline in a long-ago issue, about which I will say no more), and thrilled to see the magazine seems to really be getting its feets under it for the coming years. The new issue is apparently on its way to us soon, with fiction by N.K. Jemison, J. Robert Lennon, Karin Tidbeck, and more. It's nice to see that the magazine will be back to its regular quarterly schedule, too; it provides less surprise to those of us who subscribe, but still, there's something to be said for the predictability of a schedule...

Speaking of subscriptions, they're still just $20/year.


*this is not hyperbole. If I wanted to be hyperbolic, I'd say Ann leaps tall buildings in a single bound. That's one of the few amazing feats I have not seen her perform.

How to Save the SF Magazines

Paolo Bacigalupi, who used to work for High Country News, takes some lessons learned from his previous employment and speculates about the ways science fiction and fantasy magazines could save themselves from their ever-declining circulations. Paolo's thoughts appear in three blog posts: Part 1 (overview), Part 2 ("Marketing in Meatspace"), and Part 3 ("Online Marketing").

I don't have any great knowledge of marketing, so I will defer to Paolo and others on that, but I do hope the magazines are able to survive, partly because I respect the history they represent and partly because I like the idea of monthly magazines full of fiction being able to survive in our world.

But honestly, I only pay money to subscribe to one of them. I receive subscriptions to some others because once upon a time I reviewed them more frequently than I do now (I certainly still read them for Best American Fantasy), but for the others, when it comes time to make selections for BAF, I rely on recommendations from reliable readers for good work from them. I used to subscribe to a few of the magazines, but with one I realized I hadn't finished reading a story they published for an entire year, and another became so incredibly ugly that I found myself unwilling to read it -- the binding was so tight it made holding the magazine open difficult, the pages were crammed with small-print words on cheap paper with tiny margins, as if the whole thing were produced on a Mac 128K. I hated everything I read purely because of how it was presented, and so I stopped sending money to that magazine. (That you may now be having trouble figuring out exactly which of the possible magazines I'm talking about says an awful lot in and of itself...)

The magazines I subscribe to and read are ones that are either useful to me or ones that, when they arrive in the mail, I am usually tempted to put everything else aside and sit down and read them for a while. When Interzone arrives, for instance, I always tear the packaging open and look at every page, then at least skim all the nonfiction. The fiction isn't often to my taste, so I usually save it for later, but the design of the magazine is always so eye-catching that it simply gives me pleasure to flip through its pages, and the nonfiction is eclectic and rewarding more often than not. This is a magazine that feels like it was produced to appeal to people who are alive right now, rather than to the denizens of 1950.

The other magazines I at least skim immediately are Harper's and A Public Space. Harper's I love for the diversity of material it offers -- it's rare that an issue completely bores me -- and I would now never think of letting my subscription go, because subscribers get full access to the entire Harper's digital archive. It's not an expensive subscription, and it comes with 150 years of material. The best deal I know of in publishing.

A Public Space is beautifully designed and intelligently edited, with a range of writing of all sorts: nonfiction, poetry, fiction. Inevitably, there are things I don't read, things that don't interest me, things I don't like ... but it doesn't matter, because the variety of material and the pleasant design of the magazine causes it to maintain a strong grip on my attention.

None of what I've said here about my preferences and predilections has much to do with marketing, but it does have to do with the content delivered after the marketing has done its thing. It's hard to get me to subscribe to a magazine, yes, but it's even harder to get me to renew a subscription. I doubt I'm alone in this, particularly these days when there are so many other ways to find entertainment and fulfillment than by reading magazines.

(I'll have more to say about various lit'ry magazines that excite me in Monday's column at Strange Horizons.)

Lit'ry Magazines

My favorite benefit so far of being series editor for the upcoming Best American Fantasy is getting to read things I wouldn't otherwise know about or have ready access to, including a wide variety of magazines generally considered part of the literary mainstream. Inspired by these two posts from other bloggers, I thought I'd highlight a few that I have been looking through recently -- not an exhaustive list by any means, but rather a little sampling.

Agni is a magazine I used to subscribe to, but because I try to scatter my subscriptions, I let it go, and now I regret it. I haven't read a recent issue, but I have enjoyed some of the web-only content they've posted, and I expect the journal itself is as varied and high-quality as I always found it to be. I know I'll spend a day at the library catching up with this year's batch of fiction, in case there's something appropriate for BAF, and I look forward to it.

Gargoyle is a genuine find, a journal I hadn't encountered before beginning the BAF selection process. The quality is wildly varied, but the fiction is consistently strange, and that alone is enough for me to recommend it.

The quality of fiction in Hobart also fluctuates a bit, at least to my taste, but when it's good it's very good, indeed. I like Hobart's openness to all sorts of different things, from the realist of realism to utter batshit surrealism. It's a fine place to discover new writers with unique, individual qualities. Hobart is a young magazine yet, and lots of people have never heard of it, so I expect that it will have a breakout moment in the coming years, one where all sorts of people suddenly say, "Hey, where's this magazine been all along?" Read it now so you can feel superior to those people later.

Ninth Letter is a magazine with high production values -- it's like something from TTA Press on steroids. The design sometimes gets in the way of the readability, but when every page looks like it could be hung on a museum wall, that's a small price to pay. I've only read one issue so far, but the one I read was full of wonderfully weird work.

There was a time when I thought the New England Review was really boring, but either I or the magazine or, most likely, both have changed. This was one of the first magazines to send us copies for consideration for BAF, and to be honest, I laughed -- "What," said I to meself, "is this bastion of realism doing sending itself to Best American Fantasy?!? Whose idea of a joke is this?!" But I take my job as series editor seriously, and have vowed to read at least a few pages of every piece of fiction in every magazine we encounter, and the joke was on me. The nonfiction seems stronger to me than the fiction at the moment -- so strong, in fact, that I was considering trying to convince our guest editors to alter our guidelines somewhat to include at least one essay -- but I now am excited when each new issue arrives, because my preconceptions have been blown to bits, and that seems to me like a good state in which to read new stories.

A Public Space is a newcomer that I find myself recommending to people constantly, purely because I read the first issue cover-to-cover with great enjoyment. (It included a story by Kelly Link, which is what first brought it to my attention, but I was pleased to discover that just about everything in the first issue held my interest and sparked plenty of thought and, often, pleasure.) The fiction is a strange and eclectic mix, including both formally innovative and relatively straightforward work, the kind of mix I most enjoy, but the nonfiction is just as eclectic. I recently received the second issue, and it looks promising as well. I particularly like the section in each issue focusing on one country -- in the first issue, Japan, in the second, Russia.

Threepenny Review is another journal I've subscribed to for a while, and one that has survived my tendency to only subcribe to a magazine for a couple years. Frankly, I've seldom enjoyed much of the fiction, but the essays and reviews are among the best I know: thoughtful, surprising, beautifully written.

Zoetrope: All-Story is a magazine I've been reading for some time, though in the past I've thought its quality has been rather hit-or-miss. That's not been the case with the last couple issues, though, both of which I read cover-to-cover. In the past, Zoetrope tended toward traditional, plot-driven fiction, but the most recent issues have shown more variety of style and approach than I remember from before, which may be merely a delusional perception on my part, because I haven't gone back to old issues to compare. Whatever that perception is, though, the fact is that the newest issues are very much worth reading.

I don't know of anything in the world of literary magazines quite like the great Ralan.com market site for SF, but if you're interested in exploring the (overwhelmingly) vast world of lit journals, New Pages and Web del Sol are good places to spend time exploring. (The annual Pushcart Prize volumes are also a treasure trove of fiction, poetry, and essays you're not likely to come upon unless you devote most of your days to reading lit mags.)