My last update recounted my six appearances in Strange Horizons in the first half of the year (as reviewer, columnist and writer); in September I’ve now added a seventh appearance, my newest story “Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes”. This is the second of a set of three stories that I wrote this year on these themes—about art, audiences and performance—which I think read very well together, and are among my favourite things that I’ve done. The third is unpublished so far, but the first was “Notes Toward A Performance: The Narrow Bridge, December 2001” in Shattered Prism in August. I’ve been thinking of stories in sets and cycles more, rather than individual fixed-objects. Of course, the more bizarre the stories, the harder it is to get them published, so thinking about sets and cycles is also necessarily thinking about incomplete sets and unfinished cycles.

The other big news about me and Strange Horizons, of course, and the reason I won’t be appearing as a contributor there any more is that I’m joining them as a fiction editor. The response to this announcement has been bafflingly and overwhelmingly positive, for which I’m very grateful, and I only hope that I don’t cock it up in some memorable fashion.

This also means that my upcoming Marginalia column will be, quite unexpectedly, my last—another incomplete set! Only four out of the planned six—and I suppose I might end up blogging more longform posts here instead after all. How quickly these reversals happen, when just a couple of months ago I was announcing the opposite!

Jed Hartman recently updated his history of online sf prozines, 1985-2010 and talked a little about his own experience with Strange Horizons:

I was very dubious about the idea of a nonprofit magazine; I’d never heard of such a thing. […]  Over the years, a lot of naysayers told us that we would fail just like all the other online magazines. Which is why I’m just a little bit smug that the magazine recently reached its sixteenth anniversary.

This year’s Strange Horizons fund drive is underway right now, and if you enjoy reading it, I encourage you to support it if you can. An sf magazine that has sixteen years worth of weekly issues in its online archives is, in its own quiet way, a miracle. As of last year, Strange Horizons is on Patreon, too, with rewards including convenient monthly ebook editions of all that month’s issues.

One of the things you can do with a sixteen-year archive is go all the way back to the very first editorial and see what Mary Anne Mohanraj said in September 2000:

The genre is starting to actually reflect the world I live in. The field is growing and expanding and shifting and changing, and it’s an exciting time to be part of it.

We started this magazine because we wanted to help with that change.

It strikes me how this sounds nearly as real and present today as it did sixteen years ago. A small reason is that it’s always true: any time is exciting and full of change because it’s your time. A bigger reason is that there is a measurable, historical moment of change that’s still taking place, an opening up of the field (like many other fields) that coincides with broader access to the internet. And a third, even bigger reason is that this kind of change (like many other kinds of change) doesn’t just happen: it must be made to happen, against reaction, against indifference, through errors, past failures, again and again. Change requires persistence. And so, here we are, persisting—