semiprozines
Jul. 25th, 2018 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraBehind this cut.
Three categories here:
a, magazines that I read all of (where by "all" I mean "all their non-reprint 2017 fiction"), Strange Horizons and Uncanny
b, magazines that I read some of, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
and c, magazines that I only read what was in the packet, Fireside, Book Smugglers, and Escape Pod.
Of that last category, going by what was in the packet Fireside looks like it might be worth picking up, although realistically if I usually run out of energy before I get to Apex I'm probably not going to make it to Fireside either. I've heard Book Smugglers is publishing novellas and I've been meaning to start reading them since yay novellas (and yay more novella publishers) but here they are represented as some fiction and some reviews which seemed fine but maybe less exciting/important to the field than Fireside. And then there's Escape Pod, which normally I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole because it has "pod" right there in the title, but they did provide text of their stories, so I read them and they were enjoyable enough. (I would love for someone more astute than I am to do some kind of analysis of whether stories written for audio tend to do different things with tense and structure and stuff than stories written for text, that might be interesting, but nothing jumped out at me from this sample size.) I didn't end up with a strong preference between Book Smugglers and Escape Pod, anyways.
Strange Horizons vs Uncanny is also tricky - on the one hand, I have a deep, long-time loyalty to Strange Horizons, which I've been following and sometimes supporting since the beginning and is sort of a home base for my reading contemporary short sff and sff on the internet at all. I mean, to get a little obnoxiously hipster about it Strange Horizons was Uncanny long before Uncanny was Uncanny; Strange Horizons was pioneering the independent online magazine back when sff on the internet was Sci Fiction and the reprint magazine Infinity Plus and things like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed weren't even a stray thought in anybody's head yet. Strange Horizons planted this lawn. On the other hand, I don't really want to argue that stuff that happened almost 20 years ago has any relevance to this year's Hugos, and, to be honest, if I had to pick one magazine to tell people they should read for exciting awards-relevant short fiction, it probably wouldn't be Strange Horizons and might in fact be Uncanny. Sorry Strange Horizons, you are what they grow beyond I guess.
1. Uncanny
2. Strange Horizons
3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies
4. Fireside
5. Book Smugglers
6. Escape Pod
Three categories here:
a, magazines that I read all of (where by "all" I mean "all their non-reprint 2017 fiction"), Strange Horizons and Uncanny
b, magazines that I read some of, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
and c, magazines that I only read what was in the packet, Fireside, Book Smugglers, and Escape Pod.
Of that last category, going by what was in the packet Fireside looks like it might be worth picking up, although realistically if I usually run out of energy before I get to Apex I'm probably not going to make it to Fireside either. I've heard Book Smugglers is publishing novellas and I've been meaning to start reading them since yay novellas (and yay more novella publishers) but here they are represented as some fiction and some reviews which seemed fine but maybe less exciting/important to the field than Fireside. And then there's Escape Pod, which normally I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole because it has "pod" right there in the title, but they did provide text of their stories, so I read them and they were enjoyable enough. (I would love for someone more astute than I am to do some kind of analysis of whether stories written for audio tend to do different things with tense and structure and stuff than stories written for text, that might be interesting, but nothing jumped out at me from this sample size.) I didn't end up with a strong preference between Book Smugglers and Escape Pod, anyways.
Strange Horizons vs Uncanny is also tricky - on the one hand, I have a deep, long-time loyalty to Strange Horizons, which I've been following and sometimes supporting since the beginning and is sort of a home base for my reading contemporary short sff and sff on the internet at all. I mean, to get a little obnoxiously hipster about it Strange Horizons was Uncanny long before Uncanny was Uncanny; Strange Horizons was pioneering the independent online magazine back when sff on the internet was Sci Fiction and the reprint magazine Infinity Plus and things like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed weren't even a stray thought in anybody's head yet. Strange Horizons planted this lawn. On the other hand, I don't really want to argue that stuff that happened almost 20 years ago has any relevance to this year's Hugos, and, to be honest, if I had to pick one magazine to tell people they should read for exciting awards-relevant short fiction, it probably wouldn't be Strange Horizons and might in fact be Uncanny. Sorry Strange Horizons, you are what they grow beyond I guess.
1. Uncanny
2. Strange Horizons
3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies
4. Fireside
5. Book Smugglers
6. Escape Pod
