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 sentenc...
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 branch... 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 (ha...
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 pu...
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 ov...
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 promis...
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 Dunlo...
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 developme...
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 po...
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 ...
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, snake...
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 t...
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 ca...
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 th... 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......
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 ...
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...
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 t...
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 track...
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:
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/revie...
2015-09-15 21:03:13 +0000 UTC View PostWelcome 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 donation...
2015-09-15 09:35:10 +0000 UTC View Post