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.

DeathRay wrote of him recently that, "You never know exactly what you're going to get with an Adam Roberts novel, and that's a strength: each of his books is very different in feel from the last."

I certainly think it's a strength, but somehow-I'm ashamed to say-refusing to do the same old thing over and over can hurt you over here in the States when it comes time to building a dedicated readership. And Adam excels at difficult protagonists, often employing people whose values are starkly in contrast to our own, and he loves utilizing the "unreliable narrator," someone who has reason to lie and therefore can't be entirely trusted. It's a technique that is very familiar in the mystery genre, but doesn't always go down well in SF. Honestly, I think if he'd been published over here by a mainstream publisher, he'd be regarded as a serious literary genius like Michael Chabon. As it is, I hope he will forgive me if I say he's something of a well-kept secret. But perhaps that's beginning to change.

It's well worth reading the rest of Anders' post, and now I'm dying to read some of Roberts' novels. Plus his goofy Doctor Who parodies.

Meet Adam Roberts: the King of High Concept [Tor.com]

When we heard the words "steampunk superhero" used to describe Mann's novel Ghosts Of Manhattan, we had to ask Pyr's Lou Anders for more details. Here's what Lou said:

The book won't come out until 2010, so it's a bit early to talk about it. But it's set in Manhattan of the 1920s - but not *our* Manhattan. It's the future of a classic 1890s steampunk, projected forward a couple decades and moving laterally to America. The Ghost is a vigilante in the mold of the Shadow or the original Batman, who uses a variety of steampunk gadgets (though his gadgets are not the only steampunk elements in this world.) I think it's going to blow folks away.

But before Ghosts Of Manhattan comes out, Tor Books will be publishing Mann's Victorian steampunk novel, The Affinity Bridge, which should make him a big name in steampunk circles already. In The Affinity Bridge (already out in England), a cyborg Queen Victoria sends an adventurer, Sir Maurice Newbury, to investigate an airship crash that may be the result of an automated pilot failure. Meanwhile, a mysterious presence called the "glowing policeman" is murdering people, and revenants (aka zombies) are overrunning London.

Curious to see if Mann's quirky writing is for you? Snow Books has a Sir Maurice Newbury story, "The Shattered Teacup," up as a free PDF download and also a free podcast. It's a classic drawing-room murder mystery including a mechanical owl and a mysterious poisoning.

Above image from Countdown: The Search For Ray Palmer: Gotham By Gaslight.

About his story, Cornell writes:

Major John Hamilton serves with the 4th Dragoon Regiment of the British army in a present day rather unlike our own. Because of a single difference in the timeline that I haven't yet revealed, the empires of Europe remain in place, and have indeed spread out to compete in the colonisation of the solar system, and the Great Game espionage cold war between them continues on many fronts. Indeed, the concept of a great balance to be kept has seeped into the fabric of these civilisations in all sorts of ways. Hamilton is often called upon to work out of uniform, as what we'd these days call an intelligence officer, intervening in the plans of rival empires.

Hamilton himself is damaged, vulnerable, but also terse, repressed and honourable, though his concept of honour is shaped by his society. He can be horribly dangerous to those who get in the way of his duty, but he feels a need to be tender with innocents. He's not cruel in everyday life, but he can be something of a sadist when his mission and the nature of his enemy gives him leave to be. Indeed, he lets himself enjoy those moments of release. His relationships with women are complicated and rare. I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Ian Fleming's Bond novels (not the movies) but I'm trying to stay away from pastiche, and instead hope to explore the same debates about masculinity and Britishness he did, while perhaps coming to different conclusions. I also hope this is serious SF in all sorts of ways, and that the politics and tactics make them genuine espionage stories too, but that they're also, well, fun!

You can read the story online this afternoon, and then you'll want to scarf down the whole amazing short story collection, which includes new stories from Cory Doctorow, Pat Cadigan, Paolo Bacigalupi, and more.

Catherine Drewe, by Paul Cornell [via Pyr]