editors

[psocoptera]

Are short editors like small college presidents?

So this is the Lightspeed guy, the Clarkesworld guy, and the Uncanny spouses, plus the Asimov's editor, someone who's doing Tor novellas, and someone who does a Year's Best (... possibly the longest-running year's best series now that Dozois's gone??).

I read the Asimov's issue provided in the packet and was unimpressed. The Suzanne Palmer novelette "Books of the Risen Sea" was good and of course "Wind Will Rove" is good and "The Fourth Hill" was ok (and hey, now I'm aware of Dennis Staples as a Native American sff writer), but bleah, what the heck was the rest of that. And there's a Norman Spinrad review of Binti that is just, like, factually wrong about it, such that I'm not sure what Williams was thinking editorially there.

Lee Harris of the Tor novellas edited All Systems Red and also Down Among the Sticks and Bones, so that's kind of a wash.

Strahan seems to have put together a reasonable table of contents for his year's best, although, I don't know, it's weird to compare reprint curation to first-publishing, like, would he even know about those stories if Clarkesworld and Starlit Wood and BCS hadn't published them first. I guess I could read Infinity Wars (subtitle "no, not the Marvel one") but I don't want to. Well, I read the Vaughn and Owomoyela and Kress and Watts stories and they were all pretty good. Hmm.

So let's say:

1. Thomases (Uncanny)
2. Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld)
3. John Joseph Adams (Lightspeed)
4. Lee Harris
5. Johnathan Strahan
6. Sheila Williams


And hey, also long editors, because I've hit the point of really wanting to be done with this.

There was a mild Thing this year about long editors - whether Devi Pillai actually had enough 2017 works to qualify (you can find discussion in the comments here) which I'm honestly still kind of confused about. Anyways, here's what jumps out at me from what everyone has listed:

Devi Pillai edited Six Wakes which I don't recall thinking was *particularly* tightly written or anything.

Diana Pho - I haven't read anything. I've been sitting on this category hoping that Weave A Circle Round would pop from my library queue before voting ended but it's clearly not going to. Well, I did like "Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion" (which was very well paced) but apparently we're not supposed to think about novellas for this category, just novels, although I'm pretty sure I voted for Navah Wolfe last year on the basis of having loved Starlit Wood and the integrity of the Hugos persisted, soooo... hm.

Joe Monti edited Stars Are Legion, a fantastic and extraordinarily tightly written book that has otherwise gotten no awards love, and is clearly getting my first place vote for that.

Miriam Weinberg edited Within the Sanctuary of Wings, definite points for that.

Navah Wolfe edited Barbary Station, which I did not think was well-edited at all, sorry Navah Wolfe.

Sheila Gilbert edited a whole list of stuff none of which I have read.

So I think this looks like:

1. Joe Monti
2. Miriam Weinberg
3. Diana Pho

and not listing anyone else because I don't have a basis to judge Gilbert but don't really want to give my fourth-place vote to either of the other two left over Gilbert.

Comments

[glynhogen]

I would kind of like to see full early drafts versus final.

I mean, not really, there's enough completed work out there to read. And I don't know how much I'd care even if I voted for the Hugos. But it might be fun every so often when I have Questions and think I know why pieces of things exist or don't.

[psocoptera]

It would definitely be interesting!