A young editor once asked me what was the biggest secret to editing a fiction magazine. My answer was “confidence.” I have to be confident that the stories I choose will fit together, that people will read them and enjoy them, and most importantly, that each month I’ll receive enough publishable material to fill the pages of the magazine.
A young editor once asked me what was the biggest secret to editing a fiction magazine. My answer was “confidence.” I have to be confident that the stories I choose will fit together, that people will read them and enjoy them, and most importantly, that each month I’ll receive enough publishable material to fill the pages of the magazine.
Asimov’s Science Fiction comes out as combined monthly issues six times a year. A typical issue contains ten to twelve stories. That means I buy about 65 stories a year. Roughly speaking, I need to buy five to six stories per month—although I may actually buy two one month and ten the next. That I will receive these stories should seem inevitable. I get to choose them from about eight hundred submissions per month. Yet, since I know that I will have to reject over 99 percent of the stories that wing their way to me, there is always a slight concern that that someday 100 percent of the submissions won’t be right for the magazine.
Luckily, this anxiety is strongly offset by a lifetime of experience. For sixteen years as the editor-in-chief, and far longer as a staff member, I’ve seen that each issue of the magazine has been filled with wonderful stories. Asimov’s tales are balanced, they are long and short, amusing and tragic, near- and distant-future explorations of hard SF, far-flung space opera, time travel, surreal tales and a little fantasy. They’re by well-known names and brand new authors. I have confidence these stories will show up and that I’ll know them when I see them.
I have edited or co-edited more than two-dozen reprint anthologies. These books consisted of stories that previously appeared in genre magazines. Pulling them together mostly required sifting through years and years of published fiction. The tales have been united by a common theme such as Robots or Ghosts or The Solar System.
Editing my first original anthology was not like editing these earlier books or like editing an issue of the magazine. Entanglements: Tomorrows Lovers, Families, and Friends, which I edited as part of the Twelve Tomorrow Series, has just come out from MIT Press. The tales are connected by a theme—the effect of emerging technologies on relationships—but the stories are brand new. Instead of waiting for eight hundred stories to come to me, I asked specific authors for their tales. I approached prominent authors like Nancy Kress (who is also profiled in the book by Lisa Yaszek), Annalee Newitz, James Patrick Kelly, and Mary Robinette Kowal, as well as up and coming authors like Sam J. Miller, Cadwell Turnbull, and Rich Larson. I was working with some writers for the first time. Others, like Suzanne Palmer and Nick Wolven, were people I’d published on several occasions.
I deliberately chose authors who I felt were capable of writing the sort of hard science fiction that the Twelve Tomorrows series is famous for. I was also pretty sure that I was contacting people who were good at making deadlines! I knew I enjoyed the work of Chinese author Xia Jia and I was delighted to have an opportunity to work with her translator, Ken Liu. I was also thrilled to get artwork from Tatiana Plakhova.
Once I commissioned the stories, I had to wait with fingers crossed. What if an author went off in the wrong direction? What if an author failed to get inspired? What if they all missed their deadlines? It turned out that I had no need to worry. Each author came through with a story that perfectly fit the anthology’s theme. The material was diverse, with stories ranging from tales about lovers and mentors and friends to stories populated with children and grandparents. The book includes charming and amusing tales, heart-rending stories, and exciting thrillers.
I learned so much from editing Entanglements. The next time I edit an original anthology, I expect to approach it with a self-assurance akin to the confidence I feel when I read through a month of submissions to Asimov’s.
