Журнал Strange Horizons расширяет отдел рецензий: запуск рубрики классики и ежемесячных обзоров медиа

Size / / / We are both proud and humbled that  Strange Horizons  remains one of the places where readers of SFF still know they can go to find regular, in-depth, and hopefully entertaining reviews of all kinds of texts within the genre. From novels and poetry to films and games, we try to cover as much of the genre as we can—and have come to trust our reviewers, as we hope you have too, to do so with depth, discernment, and style. The goal is to highlight great work, question everything, and make SFF better in the discussion of it. At a time when many publications are cutting their reviews content, none of this should be taken for granted—even though it has now persisted for so long a time that (with special notice for our august predecessors, Niall Harrison and Abigail Nussbaum) we’ve built up an archive of criticism which itself has value of its own. The commitment of this magazine to reviewing and criticism—and the support for it from our readers—remains a special thing. It helps us cover not just the core works in the genre but, and perhaps especially, those works which are worth noting but might otherwise go without spotlight—the ones that push boundaries or bring in new voices, expand our understandings or challenge our assumptions. That’s what great fiction—and great SFF—should do, of course. And reviews and critical writing help us measure how it’s doing it. That’s why we’re especially happy to announce some new appointments at the Reviews Department. The excellent Aisha Subramanian will be moving into a new Consulting Editor role, and I will be stepping into the role of Senior Reviews Editor, a post last occupied by our late friend and colleague Maureen Kincaid Speller. We’re also welcoming two new additions to the Department, Kate Macdonald and AJ Odasso, who will be helping us achieve even more of that breadth and depth in our coverage. Kate was until recently the publisher and director at Handheld Press, which sought to publish “forgotten fiction, lost authors, biographies, letters and memoir,” including work by Vonda McIntyre, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and a whole swathe of women writers of weird fiction. It’s pretty great news, then, that from October, she will be overseeing a Vintage SFF strand in the Reviews Department. This will be the home for the old stuff: the SFF authors and novels (sometimes short stories) that you've heard of but never read. Each month we'll be publishing a review of a Grand Old Work of SFF that we think you'll want to read because of its prescience, its splendid writing, its ground-breakingness, and/or its sheer enjoyability. We welcome suggestions for reviews and reviewers: Titles to be reviewed should have been first published in 1975 or earlier, in any language, but should also at some point have been published in English. Send your suggestions to our new Vintage SFF Reviews Editor at  [email protected]. What we hope to do with the Vintage SFF strand is challenge a little the novelty bias of much reviewing:  SH in particular puts at its heart the discovery of new voices … but Kate intends to demonstrate that there are older ones to discover, too. Meanwhile, AJ will be keeping us bang up to date with the latest in SFF’s media landscape. This isn’t the first time we’ve had a dedicated Media Reviews Editor, but AJ enters this particular role—though they’ve been on staff at SH since 2012, and will be continuing to serve as a Senior Poetry Editor, too—at a time when SFF media is not only dominant even in so-called mainstream spaces but increasingly a vital source of fresh energy and creativity across multiple forms. Though we’re known for our book pieces, SH has always published media reviews—and AJ’s coming aboard will guarantee we’ll be doing so every month from hereon in. I’d like to close on a personal note: In opening these two new strands within our pages, we are making the first appointments in the Reviews Department since Maureen’s passing in 2022. When Maureen, Aisha, and I took on the Department in 2015, one of Maureen’s key goals was to build the next generation of reviewers. The Department is recommitting to the standards she set us: three high-quality, analytical reviews every single week, bringing you not just the best new work in the field … but the best new reviewers, too. Onwards. No comments yet. Be the first!