Hugo Semiprozines and Short Editors
Jul. 27th, 2019 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThoughts/votes/predictions about the Semiprozines and the Short Editors behind the cut.
So Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies are all magazines I read. I recced stories from Strange Horizons here and here, Uncanny here and here, and BCS here and here. When I put together my nominees, I nominated one short story from Uncanny (and everything else was from somewhere else). I really enjoyed the dinosaur and disabled-people-destroy special issues of Uncanny - the dinosaur one especially was a really clever project, maybe the coolest thing to happen in 2018 short online fiction editorially-wise, and that story I nominated was from the disabled-people-destroy issue. So it feels pretty easy to say that of those three, I would rank them Uncanny, Strange Horizons, BCS.
Shimmer is not really a magazine that's been on my radar, although I read a few stories there that other people had recced and was not particularly excited about any of them. From what they gave us in the packet, I liked the more SF-leaning stories, "From the Void" and "Thistledown Sky" and "Ghosts of Bari", but didn't find myself wishing I had been reading Shimmer all along or anything. (And given that I never read it I don't think I'll ever miss it now that it's gone, unlike Apex...)
Fireside I had also read a few stories from, and ended up reccing "Nine Negro Teeth" on the assumption that we were going to see it on the awards ballots and we might as well all read it already, which was clearly correct. I liked "A Letter to My Sister" of what we got in the Semipro packet, and "Light and Death on the Indian Battlestation" and "Birch Daughter" from Rios's Short Ed packet. One thing I enjoy about Fireside is their focus on the shorter side of short - their submission guidelines actually max out at 3k, and many of the big magazines don't even want to look at flash, so I think they have a valuable and distinctive niche going there (sort of the high-end version of DSF, I guess, a magazine I have shamefully failed to read in awhile despite a hope of submitting there again). Maybe I'll even manage to read them in 2019, especially now that Apex is out of the picture.
FIYAH I've been curious about but is purchase-only. I liked a number of stories from the packet - "With These Hands: An Account of Uncommon Labor", "The Epic of Sakina", "Yard Dog", "The Percivals: The Bennett Benefit", "Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good", "Pedaling". And I think their mission (they publish Black SFF writers) is important.
So of these three, I would have to rank them FIYAH, Fireside, Shimmer, despite that whole campaign to get Shimmer their last-chance Hugo. Sorry Shimmer. But Strange Horizons invented your whole niche and they're still waiting for theirs (because the voters in the early 00s, when Strange Horizons was the entire online-magazine show besides Sci Fiction, kept giving it to Locus) and they're basically already permanently occupying my "sympathy and sense of unfairness" slot for this.
Now, how the heck do those two sets intersect. If FIYAH was free, would I read FIYAH preferentially over BCS? Hard to say. There are a bunch of writers I like who publish with BCS, by which I mean a bunch of the stories I recced are by names I recognize, but presumably if I kept reading FIYAH some of the authors would *become* names I recognize, and given that part of their whole purpose is publishing authors who maybe haven't gotten a fair look at other magazines, it hardly seems reasonable to whine about why don't I know more of them already. I think in the end though, I am going to just stack the magazines I read all of on top of the ones I didn't, and go with my ballot thusly:
1 - Uncanny Magazine
2 - Strange Horizons
3 - Beneath Ceaseless Skies
4 - FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction
5 - Fireside Magazine
6 - Shimmer
Boring, because Uncanny has won the past three years already and if we keep this up it's going to be as bad as Locus, but there it is. (I do think they're likely to win again this year, unless a lot more people were into Shimmer than I ever heard about.)
As for Short Editors, the Thomases are on for Uncanny, Rios is on for Fireside, and Tobler is on for Shimmer. In the other three slots we have Clarke for Clarkesworld, Lee Harris for Tor.com, and Gardner Dozois for his 35th and last Year's Best Science Fiction. Dozois has won 15 previous Best Editor Hugos to the Thomases' one and is mostly on this ballot for having died. Clarke published my favorite short story of the year, "Octo-Heist in Progress", and two of my novelette nominees, and a bunch of other good stuff (recced here and here, and has been nominated a bunch of times but never won, and I'm feeling like it's his year. Lee Harris is a slightly odd case, because he's specifically the editor for Tor.com's *novella* line, which is rather different than the magazine/anthology work all these other people are doing. (And my top vote for *Long* Editor was actually on the basis of a novella, maybe wrongly so but I'm not changing it.) But he's the Murderbot editor, and he did Binti:Night Masquerade, and Expert System's Brother which was interesting, and Beneath the Sugar Sky which I can only assume he helped make as readable as it was, so, like, yay Lee Harris. So this is my ballot (and I think Clarke could really take it; he came in third to Sheila Williams' second last year).
1 - Neil Clarke
2 - Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
3 - Lee Harris
4 - Julia Rios
5 - E. Catherine Tobler
6 - Gardner Dozois
Two! Categories! Left!
So Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies are all magazines I read. I recced stories from Strange Horizons here and here, Uncanny here and here, and BCS here and here. When I put together my nominees, I nominated one short story from Uncanny (and everything else was from somewhere else). I really enjoyed the dinosaur and disabled-people-destroy special issues of Uncanny - the dinosaur one especially was a really clever project, maybe the coolest thing to happen in 2018 short online fiction editorially-wise, and that story I nominated was from the disabled-people-destroy issue. So it feels pretty easy to say that of those three, I would rank them Uncanny, Strange Horizons, BCS.
Shimmer is not really a magazine that's been on my radar, although I read a few stories there that other people had recced and was not particularly excited about any of them. From what they gave us in the packet, I liked the more SF-leaning stories, "From the Void" and "Thistledown Sky" and "Ghosts of Bari", but didn't find myself wishing I had been reading Shimmer all along or anything. (And given that I never read it I don't think I'll ever miss it now that it's gone, unlike Apex...)
Fireside I had also read a few stories from, and ended up reccing "Nine Negro Teeth" on the assumption that we were going to see it on the awards ballots and we might as well all read it already, which was clearly correct. I liked "A Letter to My Sister" of what we got in the Semipro packet, and "Light and Death on the Indian Battlestation" and "Birch Daughter" from Rios's Short Ed packet. One thing I enjoy about Fireside is their focus on the shorter side of short - their submission guidelines actually max out at 3k, and many of the big magazines don't even want to look at flash, so I think they have a valuable and distinctive niche going there (sort of the high-end version of DSF, I guess, a magazine I have shamefully failed to read in awhile despite a hope of submitting there again). Maybe I'll even manage to read them in 2019, especially now that Apex is out of the picture.
FIYAH I've been curious about but is purchase-only. I liked a number of stories from the packet - "With These Hands: An Account of Uncommon Labor", "The Epic of Sakina", "Yard Dog", "The Percivals: The Bennett Benefit", "Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good", "Pedaling". And I think their mission (they publish Black SFF writers) is important.
So of these three, I would have to rank them FIYAH, Fireside, Shimmer, despite that whole campaign to get Shimmer their last-chance Hugo. Sorry Shimmer. But Strange Horizons invented your whole niche and they're still waiting for theirs (because the voters in the early 00s, when Strange Horizons was the entire online-magazine show besides Sci Fiction, kept giving it to Locus) and they're basically already permanently occupying my "sympathy and sense of unfairness" slot for this.
Now, how the heck do those two sets intersect. If FIYAH was free, would I read FIYAH preferentially over BCS? Hard to say. There are a bunch of writers I like who publish with BCS, by which I mean a bunch of the stories I recced are by names I recognize, but presumably if I kept reading FIYAH some of the authors would *become* names I recognize, and given that part of their whole purpose is publishing authors who maybe haven't gotten a fair look at other magazines, it hardly seems reasonable to whine about why don't I know more of them already. I think in the end though, I am going to just stack the magazines I read all of on top of the ones I didn't, and go with my ballot thusly:
1 - Uncanny Magazine
2 - Strange Horizons
3 - Beneath Ceaseless Skies
4 - FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction
5 - Fireside Magazine
6 - Shimmer
Boring, because Uncanny has won the past three years already and if we keep this up it's going to be as bad as Locus, but there it is. (I do think they're likely to win again this year, unless a lot more people were into Shimmer than I ever heard about.)
As for Short Editors, the Thomases are on for Uncanny, Rios is on for Fireside, and Tobler is on for Shimmer. In the other three slots we have Clarke for Clarkesworld, Lee Harris for Tor.com, and Gardner Dozois for his 35th and last Year's Best Science Fiction. Dozois has won 15 previous Best Editor Hugos to the Thomases' one and is mostly on this ballot for having died. Clarke published my favorite short story of the year, "Octo-Heist in Progress", and two of my novelette nominees, and a bunch of other good stuff (recced here and here, and has been nominated a bunch of times but never won, and I'm feeling like it's his year. Lee Harris is a slightly odd case, because he's specifically the editor for Tor.com's *novella* line, which is rather different than the magazine/anthology work all these other people are doing. (And my top vote for *Long* Editor was actually on the basis of a novella, maybe wrongly so but I'm not changing it.) But he's the Murderbot editor, and he did Binti:Night Masquerade, and Expert System's Brother which was interesting, and Beneath the Sugar Sky which I can only assume he helped make as readable as it was, so, like, yay Lee Harris. So this is my ballot (and I think Clarke could really take it; he came in third to Sheila Williams' second last year).
1 - Neil Clarke
2 - Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
3 - Lee Harris
4 - Julia Rios
5 - E. Catherine Tobler
6 - Gardner Dozois
Two! Categories! Left!
