Just a quick call-out to remind everyone that the Strange Horizons annual fund drive is currently underway and every pound/dollar counts!
It’s no secret that I consider SH to be one of the most important and progressive speculative fiction zines out there. I’m proud to write for it, always eager to read the latest issue, and would encourage anyone who feels they can to support the magazine’s continued existence by making a donation.
SH’s strength as a zine lies in the spread of knowledge, diversity of opinion and passionate commitment of its contributors. Everyone who writes for the magazine, whether as a reviewer or as a columnist or as a fiction writer (sometimes all three) does so out of a desire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about speculative fiction, to proselytise, to criticise, to empathise – and sometimes all three. Strange Horizons is not your passive, stay-at-home kind of zine. Above all, and in whatever guise, there is active engagement.
With every week bringing some new highlight, it’s difficult and unfair to pick favourites. But for anyone new to Strange Horizons and looking to find examples of just why it’s so special, I’d urge them to have a read of Abigail Nussbaum’s recent review of Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni. Abigail offers a fine deconstruction of the text (she’s one of the best) but she doesn’t stop there. Her examination in this article of what exactly fantastic fiction is for and how far it can hope to succeed in literary terms is an articulate and incisive contribution to what should be the most important argument in SF today. I admired and loved this piece when I first read it, and it has stayed with me. I hope to return to some of the points it raises on this blog in due course.
Every instalment of John Clute’s Scores column is a privilege to read, and I sincerely hope fantastika knows how lucky it is to have him. I don’t mind what Clute writes about – I just love wallowing in his mastery of the English language. His dissection of the Great American Horror novel, and Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere in particular, has been a recent favourite.
And for SH fiction, I would like to take this opportunity to urge everyone to seek out what must be among my favourite short stories of 2013, Sofia Samatar’s ‘Selkie Stories are for Losers’, published in Strange Horizons way back in January. If you haven’t read it yet, read it now. If you read it at the time, reread it. Stories published in the first quarter of any given year often lose out when it comes to awards nominations, simply because it can be difficult to remember which year they appeared in and whether they are eligible. Sofia’s story is eligible for all next year’s ballots, and if I had my way it would appear on every single one of them! It’s beautifully written, perfectly structured, witty, sardonic, gorgeous – and I totally loved it.