Another Monday, another issue:
For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other.
I think that's one of my favourite first sentences this year,* and it comes from Jonathan Edelstein's story "2015-11-16 21:31:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi all -- this week's issue is up!
This week's story is "Liminal Grid" by Jaymee Goh:
Because you live there, in that condemned building, you know that the plants in the buildings are carefully planted into a low-maintenance, edible garden. What looks like lalang is actually serai. The branches of the trees hang with fruit that feed the local fauna on the outside, but inside, they are cover... 2015-11-09 21:17:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a quick update this week, to say that the first issue of November is up! And what do we have for you? We have:
The fourth Monday of the month brings our usual non-fiction focus: this month we have two perspectives on writing sex, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Cecelia Tan, plus Genevieve Valentine's latest column, plus a book club discussion of Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse (have you read it? Let us know what you think if you have). We also have a new poem by Ada Hoffmann, al...
2015-10-26 22:05:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings from Barcelona! A brief lull in my schedule means that I finally have a chance to send out our main donor reward this year, our 15th anniversary ebook. As well as the stories and poems by the people listed on the cover (and more!), many of whom who have provided new afterwords for their work, the book also contains a long round-table history of the magazine. It was all a lot of fun to put together, so we hope you enjoy it.
This one can be downloaded 2015-10-24 19:03:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Excuse the slightly blurry screenshot; Patreon does insist on blowing things up somewhat. The main thing is: the fund drive is over, and not only did we meet our initial $18,000 goal, but we reached all three of our stretch goals and then some.
So from January 1 2016, pay for poetry goes up to $40, pay for columns goes up to $50, and pay for articles goes up to $80. And there's a bit left over to go into the fiction budget and special projects.
A huge part of this year's success ...
2015-10-20 07:39:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings, patrons! Apologies for the relative radio silence here -- and the lack of a fund drive graph yesterday -- unfortunately the end of the fund drive has collided with a day-job business trip, which leaves me stealing time between other tasks to send out updates.
The handsome chap adorning this post is Mort, cat of our senior reviews editor Maureen Kincaid Speller (we did promise you occasional pet photos) and he is, apparently, delighted that we've reached 200 patrons. I thin...
2015-10-19 18:05:31 +0000 UTC View Post
We're very nearly there now! We just hit $17,000, unlocking the final piece of our fund drive special issue: "The Game of Smash and Recovery" by Kelly Link (podcast reading by Graeme Dunlop of Podcastle). Here's how it starts:
If there’s one thing Anat knows, it’s this... 2015-10-17 17:13:35 +0000 UTC View Post
With five and a half days left, we've reached our penultimate bonus material -- two pieces featuring Johanna Sinisalo.
First up, we have her Guest of Honor talk from Archipelacon back in June, talking about her development as a writer and feminist:
I had borrowed from the library an exhilarating b...
2015-10-14 14:39:31 +0000 UTC View Post
The striking image you see before you is Rachel Kahn's art for this week's story: "Let's Tell Stories of the Deaths of Children", by Margaret Ronald.
Also in this week's issue, a poem by Lynette Mejia, "Harrowing", and reviews of poetry by Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod, novellas by Ian Sales, and an unusual podcast by Charles Tan.
Plus! After my concerns about the fund drive doldrums 2015-10-12 22:11:19 +0000 UTC View Post
The dreaded fund drive doldrums have finally arrived. Over the course of this weekend, only $165 has been donated, compared to $715, $1204, and $817 for the other weekends this year (it's almost like there were several large conventions happening in North America...). This normally happens at some point: I admit, I was starting to think that it wouldn't this year, but last year the lowest weekend saw a mere $128 raised, so in that sense we're still doing OK.
I also admit I was hoping to ch...
2015-10-11 23:03:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Fund drive update: we've reached our next tier of bonus material! $11,000 for us means three new poems for you:
"Nettle-stung" by Shweta Narayan (includes the art used on this post):
They tell the story wrong. We were meant to be swans
spiders, peacocks, vixens, snakes. We shifted
one to the other to the other, weavers
of silk and story slipping free of ...
2015-10-07 19:21:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's the link to this week's issue.
And what's in it? We have Naru Dames Sundar's story "Broken-Winged Love", plus audio version read as usual by Anaea Lay; "Swan Girls", a new poem by Theodora Goss; Kari Sperring's latest Matrilines column, this time looking at the influence of Evangeline Walton; and (over the course of the week) reviews of work by Daniel José Older, N. K. Jemisin, and Jedidiah Berry. Enj...
2015-10-05 17:25:14 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's graph is potentially confusing but actually remains encouraging!
What we have here is progress through the last four fund drives, as indicated by the average daily donation needed to hit that year's goal. The right-hand side of the graph gets a little excitable because we typically enter the final week with some distance to go, and then get a last-minute flurry of donations to carry us over the finish line. (2012 was a partial exception, I think because we had hit our target an...
2015-10-04 18:46:35 +0000 UTC View PostWe are half-way to our goal! That means more bonus material, which in this instance is a fresh new column by John Clute:
Maybe this is claimjumping. But I do read the title as representing a moment where creative impulse and recognition of the world unite, and as a warning that a man in the terrifying prime of early middle age has written the tales we are about to encounter in order to c... 2015-10-02 16:52:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's a look at the cover for our 15th anniversary ebook! The image is by Frank Fox, cover design by one of our art directors, Heather McDougal. In case anyone else finds the colours of the background as lovely as I do (it's currently set as my phone wallpaper...), I've also attached a clean copy of the image to this post.
As Patreon supporters you're ...
2015-10-01 08:52:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Here we are! Strange Horizons' first monthly ebook, containing all of our material from September: weird stories by Gabby Reed, Jei D. Marcade, and James Robert Herndon; poems by Jenny Blackford, Carrie Naughton, Florence Lenaers, and Mat Joiner; essays by Andrea Phillips, Cheryl Morgan, and Renay; a round-table on Jupiter Ascending; and a dozen reviews. Our moody cover art (for Jei Marcade's story) is by Maggie Ivy.
We're on an ebooks learning curve, so do report any bugs or...
2015-09-28 18:30:21 +0000 UTC View Post
It's Sunday, so -- as those of you who were here last weekend will know -- it must be graph time! This week's graph is slightly more esoteric than last week's offering, but it's still good news.
If I'd put up an update of the cumulative percentage raised tracker from last week's post, what you would see is that we're still ahead of last year's curve. As Week 2 draws to a close, we've raised ...
2015-09-27 12:50:27 +0000 UTC View PostHere we are, then -- the first Strange Horizons of the Patreon era, and our first paid post, to mark this week's issue. Our story is "Bodies Are the Strongest Conductors" by new writer James Robert Herndon; our poem is "Crumbs" by Florence Lenaers; and we have reviews of books by Jo Walton, Joe Abercrombie, and Elizabeth Hand.
... and also, because we have reached $5,000 in the fund drive, we have our next piece of bonus material: an interview with World Horror Grandmaster ...
2015-09-21 20:45:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Here is a graph that I like.
I have a big spreadsheet that I update during fund drives. I started it for the first fund drive after I became Editor-in-Chief, in 2011, and have been updating it every year since. Partly it's just a necessity: until now we haven't used any external crowdfunding sites, so there had to be a record of how much money had come in, and even now I update the tracker rocket on the main SH site manually. But it's also useful as a tool to see what works in terms of...
2015-09-20 10:53:22 +0000 UTC View PostWe've reached the next milestone in this year's fund drive! $3,000 means three poems on myth and fairytale themes, by Jane Yolen, Sasha Kim, and Carlos Hernandez. Enjoy! Next up, at $5,000 we'll be publishing an interview with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
"The Truth About Briars" by Jane Yolen:
Here is what I know about briars:
They are democratic, all who ru...
2015-09-17 16:28:34 +0000 UTC View Post
We've reached $1,000 in this year's fund drive and published our first piece of bonus content -- a review of the Strugatsky Brothers novel Hard to be a God, by Gautam Bhatia. At $3,000, we'll publish poems by Jane Yolen, Sasha Kim and Carlos Hernandez!
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2015/09/hard_to_be_a_go.shtml
(Note: there will be an ebook of all the bonus content a...
Welcome to our new Patreon! Exciting, isn't it?
This is, as I'm sure you're all aware, a significant shift in funding model for SH: away from once-a-year lump-sum donations, towards recurring donations. We've always resisted subscriptions as such, because (rightly or wrongly) they felt like they might obscure the not-for-profit nature of the magazine. Patreon's emphasis on per-thing donations feels like a better fit for us.
It's also an experiment, since we don't know what th...
2015-09-15 09:35:10 +0000 UTC View Post