All contributions by:

Jason Sanford

Strange Horizons, March 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ August 25, 2009

Earlier this year I immersed myself in online fiction through the annual storySouth Million Writers Award, which it’s my joy to run. The great thing about the award is it’s a fun way to keep up with online fiction trends—and the biggest trend this year was how the number of quality online short fiction venues [...]

Strange Horizons, February 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ April 9, 2009

Pity new writers of SF/F short stories. They come to the genre bubbling with exciting ideas and linguistic beauty, and smack right up against reality. The simple fact is that publishing short fiction in professional speculative fiction markets is not only downright hard, it’s also very much like the proverbial fart in a hurricane—no [...]

Strange Horizons, January 2009

By Jason Sanford ⋅ March 10, 2009

One of the clichés thrown at new writers is “Read the publications you submit to!” The reasoning being that each magazine’s fiction uniquely reflects the wants and desires of a particular editor. If a writer’s fiction doesn’t match what the editor already publishes, why waste everyone’s time by submitting to said editor?
As with all [...]

Tesseracts Twelve, edited by Claude Lalumière

By Jason Sanford ⋅ January 18, 2009

I’m about to play the stereotypical ugly American, so I might as well confess up front my ignorance about a country other than my own. Worse, this country is my neighbor to the north, Canada. Land of cold fronts and French speakers and the Commonwealth and socialized medicine and endless other “oddities” to which most [...]

shortshortshort.com, November 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ January 11, 2009

When my editor asked me to review the November, 2008, offerings from Bruce Holland Rogers’s shortshortshort.com, I was tempted to ask if said editor knew of my reputation around flash fictional lands. After all, an essay I wrote a while back stirred up some angry feelings among flash fiction writers. This feeling was added to, [...]

Strange Horizons, October 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ December 3, 2008

What’s the ideal short story length? Such a simple question, yet one that’s impossible to answer without embracing the old cliché that “a short story should be only as long as needed to tell the story.”
According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, short stories fall into the following categories: true short stories, [...]

Strange Horizons, September 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ October 27, 2008

Science fiction writers have a dirty little secret: Sometimes we don’t like outsiders entering our imaginary worlds.
It’s not that we don’t like readers. After all, every literary genre lives only through the graces of that genre’s readers. The problem for science fiction writers, however, comes in explaining to the general public many of our genre’s [...]

Strange Horizons, August 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ September 18, 2008

One of the classic knocks the literati give against speculative fiction is that the genre exists merely as escapist reading. This silly view holds that it’s wrong to read science fiction or fantasy simply to experience a different world, while the reverse—that it’s quite all right to read a highbrow literary novel and experience a [...]

Strange Horizons, July 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ August 10, 2008

It sometimes appears that humanity is fated to eternally ask deep questions while receiving few deep answers in return. Perhaps this is because we humans are very good at posing the big questions—What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of good and evil? Is there a God?—but not so good at finding [...]

Strange Horizons, June 2008

By Jason Sanford ⋅ July 7, 2008

Online speculative fiction magazines are held to a strange standard of success. Even though the best e-zines reach far more readers than most genre print magazines, there are continual questions on the viability of these online publications. One of the most recent regurgitations on this theme came from Simon Owens, who asked on his site, [...]

Tales of Moreauvia #1

By Jason Sanford ⋅ June 10, 2008

The subtitle of the new print magazine Tales of Moreauvia instantly stakes out where this intriguing semi-prozine plans to take readers: on “Flights of Historical Fancy.” While this theme might seem to place Tales of Moreauvia on the same ground as the well-established Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction, the difference is that [...]