I sat down with Datlow at WorldCon, where she won a Hugo last week for best editor of short fiction, and we talked shop.

io9: You do most of your work in genre fiction. How do you define horror, as opposed to science fiction or fantasy?

ED: I'm very broad in my definition of horror. There's a long tradition of science fiction horror like the story "Who Goes There," which became the movie The Thing, or The Fly. Then there's the continuum of which ranges from dark fantasy to horror. [Australian horror writer] Kaaron Warren says horror goes farther than dark fantasy. But what's that extra step that makes it horror? Horror is edgier. Dark fantasy feels mushier to me. Finding the difference - it's an instinct. And they overlap a lot. For years I thought the magazine Weird Tales was dark fantasy, not horror. But since Ann [VanderMeer] took over, the stories are edgier, more in the horror vein.

Horror isn't only about ghosts or monsters. For example, paranormal romance seems the antithesis of horror. Once you have a sexy, fun vampire who is sweet, and you have a happy ending, it's not horror.

Often, science fiction and horror readers and writers won't look outside of their own field for new work. Look at the Stoker Awards [for horror fiction] – the members rarely look at the horror published in mainstream publications . I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in Best Horror of the Year. Still, people will ask, "How dare you put a "mainstream" story in there?" But if I can justify a powerful story as horror because it creates that sense of unease and/or dread, I'll use it.

Where do you find new horror writers for your anthologies?

I'm reading of every publication in and out of the field regularly for my Best of the Year. I read the magazines Black Static, Interzone, Crimewave, as well as crime collections and anthologies. I read Akashic Books' noir series. And of course I cover SF mags like F&SF, Asimov's and Analog, although I'll rarely find a horror story in the last. I'll read any anthologies or collection I can get my hands on. If I find a book mentioned in Publisher's Weekly and it looks like it will be dark, I'll track it down.

But sometimes I find stories just because people send their obscurely published stories to me. That's what happened with Miranda Siemienowicz. She sent me her stories and I took one, called "Dress Circle," for Best Horror of the Year 1. Most of the people in the first volume [covering 2008] are writers I don't know personally or professionally. When editing short fiction you always have to look for fresh blood. Most short story writers move on to novels - that's just a given. So you have to look to new writers for magazines and anthologies.

There has been a lot of talk in the science fiction and fantasy community lately about how many anthologies include only male authors. Do you ever worry about gender balance when you put together an anthology?

Not all that much, particularly not in horror because there are just more male horror writers than female and there always have been - this has been discussed to death in the horror field for decades. Because I read so widely for my year's best, I'm generally aware of who is writing what. In editing an original anthology, I specifically invite writers whose work is to my taste and might check out something that is recommended to me. I'm glad to see that more young female writers and writers of color are entering the fantastic field . I'd like to see more writing horror as well. But when it comes down to what I or any editor buys it's always going to be the story itself, not who wrote it.

By the same token, of course there's an old boy's - and for that matter, girl's - network in genre fiction and in any other literary endeavor. People are more willing to work with the writers whose work they already know and love. Right now, a large percentage of horror writers are still male and that's the percentage in my anthologies. But it's good to be aware of the balance. Interestingly, in the 1980s, women dominated the Nebula nominations in short fiction: Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, and Connie Willis were at the top of the field in visibility.

Where do you see the future of short stories going with more magazines moving online?

I spent ten years in the digital domain – I was publishing online stories for Omni [in the mid-1990s]. So I'm comfortable with that idea, but I just wish online fiction would start making money for people. I'd also like to start reading ebooks, but I don't currently have a reader.

Yesterday at science fiction convention WorldCon, a panel of editors discussed how they find and curate the stories that pack the shelves at your bookstore – or fill the pages of your favorite SF magazine. On the panel were Asimov's editor Sheila Williams, Pyr Books editor Lou Anders, celebrated anthology editor Ellen Datlow, and Analog editor Stanley Schmidt.

Williams and Schmidt, who work in the same building, talked a lot about how to maintain a story balance when you have to fill a magazine with new material month after month. Said Williams:

We publish mostly SF with some fantasy. And sometimes you discover that you have too many generation ship stories one month, or too many time travel stories – or too many stories about the close personal relationship between a boy and his father. Once I got two stories about what would have happened if Castro had gone into baseball instead of becoming a dictator. So of course we had to publish both. They went in very different directions. But you always try to maintain a balance of stories – even at the level of trying to have as many humorous stories as depressing ones.

Schmidt said he wants to see more stories with good science in them. He said:

Science is underutilized and not emphasized enough. I really wish I saw more stories with cutting edge science as well as a great story with good characters. He said: Science is underutilized and not emphasized enough. I really wish I saw more stories with cutting edge science as well as a great story with good characters. A good science fiction story should contain an element of speculative science, but it must be made plausible. Star Wars is not science fiction – it's a Western in space. But here's something that may surprise you. Flowers For Algernon is a perfect example of science fiction because you can't have a story without the experiment.

A publisher of novels as well as short stories, Anders said he's willing to take more risks with short stories:

As long as readers like 70 percent of the stories in an anthology, that's great. So you can take more risks with a short story in an anthology. But novels – those have to keep me in a job. So I'm less likely to take risks on that kind of material. I also don't think that what makes good science fiction is the science per se. It's the healthy skeptical attitude science fiction fosters that's important. The post-enlightenment attitude.

Datlow, who has edited countless anthologies including the annual Best Horror of the Year and Poe, said that she aims to create anthologies that "corrupt your mind with new things." She added:

I like to mix genres, like when I edited the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. But it really brought out all these politics around science fiction versus fantasy. People took me to task.

Currently Datlow is working on an anthology of cat stories, and said that's been one of the hardest projects for her to find the right balance of stories for. "There are a lot of really bad, cutsey cat stories out there," she said with a sigh. "And not a lot of good ones. I've got 70 percent of the stories for this anthology, and still need more." (So if you have a great, non-cutsey cat story, Datlow may be editing the perfect anthology for you to submit work to.)

Her comment sparked a lot of agreement among the other panelists, who all admitted that they have often been in the position of trying to find great stories. They are constantly hungry for new writers and new stories to fill the pages of their publications.

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