Jonathan Strahan has been editing collections of the year ’s best short fiction for several year — and it ’s no easy project . In this essay , Strahan speak about read a whole year ’s worth of tale for theBest Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 8 .
Reading for a year
by Jonathan Strahan
Being a twelvemonth ’s adept editor program is a flake like being a mark between a detective and the most passionate , obsessed reader you could suppose . You need to have some kind of investigative method to ascertain , weigh and consider storey , and you demand the passion to keep looking at tale long after the point when any sane individual would have given up and headed to the beach .
I set off edit ‘ Best of the Year ’ anthologies in Australia nigh two tenner ago . It was a soft introduction to the summons of form on a ‘ good of the Year ’ serial . The cyberspace was in its early childhood , online publishing did n’t really survive , and the venue where short fiction could be published were well known . Looking back , I would guess my then cobalt - editor Jeremy Byrne and I read and considered fewer than three hundred stories for The Year ’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy , an almost fabulously little number of history compare to today . Yet it set the blueprint for what I do now . Send out song for stories , make leaning , read and re - read tale , and then winnow them down to a shortlist , then a table of capacity , and finally a run order of magnitude in a manuscript .
By the time I co - redact my first ‘ Best of the Year ’ anthology for the US market , Science Fiction : The Best of 2003 with Karen Haber , the world had begun to commute , but not too radically . While the series extend all of the science fabrication bring out in the English linguistic communication , there were still fewer than two thousand stories published ( if I call back the one-year estimates from Locus correctly ) , and most of those in well - establish venues like Asimov ’s , Analog , or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . Online publication was begin to be a factor , with locus like Ellen Datlow ’s SciFiction and Eileen Gunn ’s Infinite Matrix , write top quality fiction , but was still publishing at a manageable rate . The torrent was yet to come . Still , it took organisation and preparation to take through the year , and an obsessive middle for a great report .
Move forward just a few years to 2007 when I launch The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year serial and the world was change , and beginning to exchange very quickly . Online publishing was changing book publishing generally , and short fable particularly , by lour production cost and making it simple and easy to get fiction in front of readers . It was , I suspect , the first year , of peak scant fable . The year when the number of stories published began to explode . Where there were 2,000 or so story published each year at the beginning of the decade , by the end of the decade that number would have quintupled to more than 10,000 ( base on nothing more than my rough guesswork and idea ) . The good in this almost all outweighs the bad . The increment in online publishing create the chance for story from a divers range of writer and countries , with a diverse range of worldviews , to get to referee in a path that had never existed before . Suddenly it was easy , or easier , to find stories by writers from Thailand or Vietnam or Lagos , and by writers with something other than square white virile backgrounds . It ’s invigorating , but it derive with the challenge that you have to calculate through a lot of level to find the right 1 .
It changed my reading year forever . While the calendar year begins in January , my reading class begin in October . That ’s when the first proofs of quarterly magazines and advanced reader copies of anthologies and short write up collections begin to appear in my inbox or put up situation boxful . I ’m usually still working on the book covering the current twelvemonth so they go on a bookshelf or into a folder on my reader and are ignore ( mostly ) for a month or two . Still , as I sour through nail down my book , which give-up the ghost to the publisher in January , I am start to say . mail - it note appear in magazines and books with piffling scrawled notes on them , a spreadsheet begins to get filled out and the selection process commence .
This is slow by the year ending . Just as I jump reading for next class ’s Quran I equilibrise make out this twelvemonth ’s with puzzle out on the Locus Annual Recommend Reading List . It ’s my role to convene the radical of readers who vote on and finalise the light fable part of the list . It ’s a collegial time when like - minded hoi polloi argue over the best of the year . It ’s tremendous fun , but it does delay my paying tending to next year .
I probably only really get fully focussed on register for the book in February . I already find like I ’m calendar month behind , but by now the novel class ’s book is safely contracted and I ’m chasing and reading story that appear in all sorts of strange post . I typically see and am aware of all of the major market , but then there ’s small public press markets , pocket-size and one - snap production , international clobber , and things published outside the SF scene altogether . It ’s dizzying . The process of selection , though , is almost exactly what you think it might be .
When I read a story and like it I make a note of it in a spreadsheet . If I really like it I summate an star . I ca n’t take myself to compose in books so I add a post - it take note with an star for stories in anthology or aggregation . As the year break on I keep an oculus on the listing , as it blossoms and grows . Hopefully by August I have a reasonably solid base long - inclination of history I ’ve liked from the class . It ’ll persist in to grow through till December , but somewhere around here the winnowing begin . I go back and look at listing . Do I commemorate a news report without re - reading it ? How does it place upright up to re - reading ? Generally any tale that make up my final list has been read three or four times , and I ’m pretty sure about it . Other divisor follow in to play as well about which stories get used . Can I get the right to the story , do I have two or three similar stories to pick between . That kind of affair . And so it get on to the final list .
How do I spot a great floor ? just the mode you do . I grow to the next Sir Frederick Handley Page of the playscript or magazine or website and start reading . If I get lost in the account , and break off thinking that I need to get through it so I can read the next one on my tilt , then I know it ’s safe . If , when I get to the end of the story , I feel aroused about it , then I know it ’s a well chance to make my record . And if I remember it and remember about it and ca n’t get it out of my head , for whatever reasonableness ( great theatrical role , fascinating idea or whatever ) , then I ’m pretty sure it ’s a great story . How do I think you could spot a great write up ? Well , you interpret your own way , but if the story speak to you then it ’s good . If the the great unwashed you talk to about fiction are blown out by it too , then it ’s probably enceinte . And if you ’re still talking about it months later then you hump it ’s reasonably special . And sometimes you just know . I can look back to the thrilling minute when I first read Lucius Shepard ’s “ R&R ” in Asimov ’s in 1986 . I have sex I was reading a stunningly bang-up story as I read it . I knew it was a classic when I put it down . And I ’ve never doubted that since . That happen rarely , though , and it ’s why I keep reading . To find out the next “ R&R ” , and to experience that sort of mo again . It ’s also what I hope the good of the twelvemonth series render to readers . The opportunity to have that experience when reading brusque fiction . And do I ever interpret a story once and know it ’s pop off to be in my best of the year and win awards : sure . It ’s the good part of what I do .
Full revealing : My account “ The Master Conjurer ” is included in this volume .
Jonathan Strahan
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