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.

Among the participating authors are Matthew Battles, whose article on space travel we linked to the other day, as well as Susanna Breslin, Michelle Tea, Luc Sante, many more. They call their project Significant Objects. Each author buys a cheap trinket at a thrift store, invents a backstory for it, and then posts it on eBay. The opening bid price is exactly what they paid for it - usually just a few dollars. Most of the objects seem to be strange nick nacks, like a cow statue covered in red peppers or a plastic hot dog.

The project, conceived by io9 pal Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, is only a few days old, so it's hard to say for sure whether these objects will acquire substantial value based on their invented alternate histories. Still, it's obvious that some stories appeal more than others. Lucinda Rosenfeld's backstory about a cow-shaped creamer has already gotten 10 bids that have increased the value of the object from $1 to nearly $10. Maybe it's because her story is all about how Norman Rockwell was secretly depressed and left this cow creamer behind at a sanitorium where he spent time? I'm excited about an alternate America where Rockwell was depressed all the time.

So far none of the stories have been explicitly science fictional, but taken together they represent an interesting kink in the alternative history genre. One thing is certain: If Rosenfeld's success is any indication, these authors may actually get paid more for short fiction on eBay than they would at most publications.

Check out Significant Objects and see Rosenfeld's Cow Creamer on eBay.

Clarkesworld Magazine polled some of the best short fiction editors in the field about the state of the market, and they had some pretty interesting things to say. There seems to be some consensus that everything's going electronic. Mike Resnick puts it most simply:

[T]here are currently 17 science fiction magazines paying what SFWA considers pro rates, and 14 of them are electronic, so I don't think the short story is in as much trouble as it appeared to be a decade ago.

Weird Tales editor (and past io9 contributor) Ann VanderMeer expands on that point:

One of the main changes is the delivery system and how we communicate with each other. Technology has motivated us to change the way we do business. Right now it is more difficult to sustain a hard-copy magazine as the audience is getting more and more of their reading done online or on other virtual devices. Online magazines are getting more sophisticated and garnering more and more readers....

But on the downside, we've become so fragmented. And we seem to have no patience. Many short fiction venues out there are looking for shorter and shorter pieces, perhaps for space considerations, but I also think for the shorter attention spans of the current readership. And that's a shame.

Palimpsest author Catherynne M. Valente sounds a similar note, in an interview with Bookslut:

While there are a number of markets — and I find myself in a situation where the demand for my short fiction is often greater than for longer pieces; where I literally cannot keep up with the demand — I question whether actual readership of short fiction has increased in any significant way. Single author short story collections are still extremely limited in sales and appeal, and I do not see the same excitement about author A's newest short story as their newest novel, unless author A publishes only rarely. Short stories do not seem to get the discussion or the critical attention at the fan level, though in the world of writers being read by other writers they are certainly quite the currency — it is still the conventional wisdom that one ought to make a name in short fiction before publishing a novel.

I think, for one thing, the short story will get a whole lot shorter. Twitter is teaching us all to prune our prepositions, and as the unit of information gets smaller, so will fiction. I think there are a number of creative directions short fiction can take — tradable stories like cards, ARGs [Alternate Reality Games], text message fiction. The world will always want to tell stories, and our generation will always try to access information at faster and faster rates. Short fiction would seem to fill the niche perfectly — and yet, I think part of the reason short stories are not more popular is simply that very, very many of them, even in the prestige publications, are not very good.

I would certainly say the Internet is the future of short fiction. Print magazines will last awhile longer; print anthologies are still a going concern. But the real sharpshooters are publishing online, and as media, more and more, is perceived by the audience as something that ought to be free, online fiction will be the bulk of short fiction reading soon, if it is not already.

But actually, the most interesting comment from the Clarkesworld forum doesn't directly relate to how electronic markets are ruling, and changing, short fiction. (Although it probably does relate indirectly.) It comes from Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I think the biggest change in SF's overall readership is that it's become much less dominated by hardcore SF buffs whose reading consists largely of SF. Compared to a generation ago, a lot more of our readers are just plain middlebrow readers-people who read a little SF along with a little of a lot of other things, and who don't necessarily regard the SF as alien to the rest of literature, or below the salt, or any of that stuff.

[Today's readers] are probably not connected to the SF social scene, they don't assess their SF and fantasy reading against a huge backdrop of inside-baseball industry lore, they may not have read all of the classics, but they're pretty good at making sense of fairly sophisticated SF storytelling because, guess what, in 2009, hundreds of millions of people are good at making sense of sophisticated SF storytelling. The problem for SF writers and publishers today isn't that there's not a mass audience for high-end SF storytelling; it's that there are immense numbers of other diversions on offer for those hundreds of millions of people.

At first glance, Dick's 1954 story "The Father Thing" is a standard riff on the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers theme of alien bug creatures replacing humans. (Another, earlier classic along similar lines, Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, is also available as a free online read.)

What sets "The Father Thing" apart is its more intimate, Twilight Zone-esque quality. The alien doppelgangers are a home invasion, not a planetary invasion. They only want to replace one single family — starting with the father, then moving on to the mother and finally the son. The son, Charles, is the only one who realizes that anything is wrong, and he quickly realizes that he won't be able to convince any adults to believe him. Instead, he goes to the neighborhood kids, who believe him instantly without even questioning. That's my favorite part of the story — the way in which the neighbor kids are just like, "Sure, your dad's been replaced with an alien. It sucks when that happens."

Of course, it's all a metaphor for coming-of-age crap and feeling alienated from your parents and realizing that you and your peers belong to a different world than the older generation. But it's also a nice dose of Dickian paranoia, especially as the story gets creepier and creepier.

Meanwhile, I praised Kelley Eskridge's story collection Dangerous Space a while back, and three stories from it are online. All three stories clearly deal with the theme of art and artificiality. And the dangers and challenges involved in trying to reach an authentic artistic voice in a world of shapeshifters, emotional broadcast technology and dystopian art lords. And two of the stories, "And Salome Danced" and "Dangerous Space (PDF)," feature the same protagonist, the genderless producer/director named Mars. The third, "Strings," features a violnist who dares to improvise in a world that's rejected spontenaeity in music.

All these stories are well worth spending a Sunday afternoon reading, with a mug of tea. And there's plenty more at the link. [via Free Speculative Fiction Online]

"The Father Thing"-inspired photo by Demcanulty.

Fantasy Magazine started as a print periodical in 2005 and switched to publishing online issues in February of last year, so it's an ideal forum for discussion on the increasing troubles of our speculative fiction providers. Columnist Randy Henderson (whose "Why We Need Scientist Heroes Again" made my io9 implant beep with joy) asks:

What dark forces threaten our pulp magazines? Are online magazines any better off? And how can both print and online magazines stand out and prevail in this crazy wired world of information overload and multimedia mania?

Those are questions authors, editors, and publishers have struggled with ever since the first geek scribe typed "alt.sf.creative" into her primitive terminal. Sure, Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog are all losing subscribers; hell, you're probably reading this very article on your iPhone. But Henderson points out that it's a magazine's responsibility to adapt to its readers' technology and lifestyles, for better or for worse:

There's plenty of stuff out there to distract us all. Expecting readers to remember to check out your magazine a month or six from now for the next big issue stuffed full of fictiony goodness is asking a bit much. But give those readers a tasty little online snack every day and they’ll constantly drop by and check in on you, kind of like a broke college student.

And he gets right to the heart of the matter with his next bit of advice.

The absolute best thing any speculative fiction magazine can have is outstanding speculative fiction.

... if you sell truly great fiction then readers will buy it. But only if they can trust it will be of the highest quality, they are reminded when it is available, and they can easily find and purchase it for a reasonable price.

I suppose that's why Fantasy posted a stories of 2008 roundup and poll, with prizes. They're just doing their part to bring speculative fiction further into the future.

Randym Thoughts: On the Future of Speculative Fiction Magazines [Fantasy Magazine]

First of all, Gardner Dozois just announced the table of contents of the next Year's Best SF anthology, and it seems to include a lot of stuff from original anthologies like Eclipse 2, Fast Forward 2, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Galactic Empires, Fast Ships, Black Sails, Seeds Of Change and others. Maybe I'm on crack, but was there always such a high proportion of the year's best stories from anthologies rather than magazines? (Full list below.)

Meanwhile, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the source of a few of those best stories, just announced it's going bi-monthly. (Side note: I'm glad "The Political Prisoner" and "Five Thrillers," my faves from last year's F&SF, made it in.) In practice, this move doesn't mean F&SF will get all that much smaller — it'll be doing all double issues, so there will be only about 10 percent less content in 2009. And I get why it's happening — postage costs are shooting up, and this is a way to reach subscribers more cheaply.

But it also seems to bring the magazine closer to being a bimonthly anthology, instead of a magazine. (To me, part of the distinction between magazines and anthologies is the extreme regularity with which magazines appear. Your mileage, as usual, may vary.) More importantly, it seems to be another stage in the slow, lingering death of the print mags: already, their circulations are plummeting, and they claim less rack space in bookstores and newstands. Coming out half as often means you get half as much visibility in retail venues, since few bookstores will keep you on the shelf for two whole months. It means F&SF is resigning itself to servicing its existing subscriber base, instead of trying to reach new readers via retail distribution.

So here's the full TOC of this year's best:

• TURING’S APPLES, Stephen Baxter (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• FROM BABEL’S FALL’N GLORY WE FLED, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• THE GAMBLER, Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2, ed. Lou Anders)
• BOOJUM, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (Fast Ships, Black Sails, ed. Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer)
• THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE, Alastair Reynolds (Galactic Empires, ed. Gardner Dozois)
• N-WORDS, Ted Kosmatka (Seeds of Change, ed. John Joseph Adams)
• AN ELIGIBLE BOY, Ian McDonald (Fast Forward 2, ed. Lou Anders)
• SHINING ARMOUR, Dominic Green (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. George Mann)
• THE HERO, Karl Schroeder (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• EVIL ROBOT MONKEY, Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. George Mann)
• FIVE THRILLERS, Robert Reed (F & SF, April 2008)
• THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK, Jay Lake (Clarkesworld, March 2008)
• INCOMERS, Paul McAuley (The Starry Rift, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• CRYSTAL NIGHTS, Greg Egan (Interzone, April 2008)
• THE EGG MAN, Mary Rosenblum (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• HIS MASTER’S VOICE, Hannu Rajaniemi (Interzone, October 2008)
• THE POLITICAL PRISONER, Charles Coleman Finlay (F & SF, August 2008)
• BALANCING ACCOUNTS, James L. Cambias (F & SF, February 2008)
• SPECIAL ECONOMICS, Maureen McHugh (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow)
• DAYS OF WONDER, Geoff Ryman (F & SF, October/November 2008)
• CITY OF THE DEAD, Paul McAuley (Postscripts # 15)
• THE VOYAGE OUT, Gwyneth Jones (Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, ed. Lynne Jamneck)
• THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM, Daryl Gregory (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• G-MEN, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, ed. Lou Anders)
• THE ERDMANN NEXUS, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s, October/November 2008)
• OLD FRIENDS, Garth Nix (Dreaming Again, ed. Jack Dann)
• THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY, James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER’S MOONS’ BLUES, Gord Sellar (Asimov’s, July 2008)
• BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DAWN, Aliete de Bodard (Interzone, November 2008)
• THE TEAR, Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires, ed. Gardner Dozois)

Originally published in the 2009 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, the roundtable includes some hilarious stuff about the kinds of stories the short-story editors see too often. Apparently there is a whole flood of stories where a plague transforms the human race, except for one person who's immune. I Am Legend FTW! Also, ever since people started circulating the advice that you have to "grab" the editor in your story's first paragraph, there's been a rash of stories where a spaceship blows up in the first couple of sentences.

They also have some advice on what you should be reading to prepare yourself to write short fiction. (Anthology editor Van Gelder, not surprisingly, thinks you should read some anthologies.) And Groppi, somewhat depressingly, says the younger crop of short fiction writers are resigned to the fact that you can't make a living writing short fiction. [John Joseph Adams]

I wouldn't claim to be an expert on short fiction writing, but I have written over a hundred of the little fuckers, a large proportion of which have been science fiction-y. Here are a bunch of do's and don'ts, that I discovered the hardest way possible.

World-building should be quick and merciless. In a novel, you can spend ten pages explaining how the 29th Galactic Congress established a Peacekeeping Force to regulate the use of interstitial jumpgates, and this Peacekeeping Force evolved over the course of a century to include A.I.s in its command structure, etc. etc. In a short story, you really need to hang your scenery as fast as possible. My friend and mentor d.g.k. goldberg always cited the Heinlein line: "The door dilated," which tells you a lot about the surroundings in three words. Little oblique references to stuff your characters take for granted can go a long way.

Make us believe there's a world beyond your characters' surroundings. Even though you can't spend tons of time on world-building, you have to include enough little touches to make us believe there's stuff we're not seeing. It's like the difference between the fake house-fronts in a cowboy movie and actual houses. We should glimpse little bits of your universe, that don't necessarily relate to your characters' obsessions.

Fuck your characters up. A little. Just like with worldbuilding, you can't necessarily devote pages to your characters' childhoods and what kind of underwear they wear under their boiler suits. Unless your story is really a character study with a bit of a science fiction plot. I used to have a worksheet that included spaces to fill in in info about each character's favorite music, hatiest color, etc. etc. Never filled those out. If I'd tried to force myself to come up with a favorite color for every character, I would have given up writing. But do try to spend a bit of time giving all of your characters some baggage, just enough to make them interesting. Most science fiction readers are interested in characters who solve problems and think positively, but that doesn't mean they can't have some damage.

Dive right in — but don't sign-post your plot in big letters. When I started writing stories, my early efforts meandered around for pages before something happened to one of the characters to make him/her freak out. And then the rest of the story would be the character(s) dealing with that problem. And then, as I got more practiced, I found the foolproof map to awesome storytelling: introduce whatever it was that was freaking out my characters in the very first sentence of the story! And then the story could be about them dealing with that problem, until they solved it in the very end. It was so perfect, how could it fail? It took me another year or two to realize that plunging the characters into the story's main conflict right away was just as boring, in its own way, as the ten pages of wandering in circles. The best short stories I've read are ones which start in the thick of things, but still keep you guessing and let you get to know the characters before you fully comprehend the trouble they're in.

Experiment with form. Short fiction isn't one form, it's a whole bunch of forms jammed together according to their length. Short stories include your standard 3,000 word mini-odyssey thru the psyche. But they also include flash fiction (sometimes defined as under 100 words, sometimes under 500 or even under 1,000.) And those wacky list things that McSweeney's runs sometimes. In fact, for a while there, postmodern short fiction was all about the list, or the footnotes, or the krazy monologue, or the story told in office memos. Try writing super-short stories of only 10 words, or mutant essay-stories written by a fictional person. Also, if you always write third person, try first person. Or if you're always doing first person, try third.

Think beyond genre. Often the best genre fiction is the stuff that cross-germinates. Pretend you're actually writing your story for the New Yorker, and try to channel George Saunders or even Alice Munro. See how far you can go towards writing a pure lit piece while still including some elements of speculation. Or try writing your story as a romance. Or a mystery. Imagine it as a Sundancey indy movie.

Don't confuse your gimmick with your plot. You may have a great idea for a piece of future technology, or some amazing mutation that turns a whole bunch of people into musicvores who survive by eating your memories of rock concerts. Maybe you have the most original basic premise evar — but that's not your plot. Your plot is how your new widget changes the people in your story, and how it affects their lives. Or what decisions your people make as a result of this new technological breakthrough.

Don't fall into the character-based/plot-based dichotomy. People, especially in writing groups and workshops, will try to categorize stories as based on either plot or character. This is a poisonous idea that will turn you into a cannibalistic freak wearing a belt made out of human spinal cords. There's no such thing as a character-based story or a plot-based story, because every story has both. Even the most incident-free Ploughshares romp or the most twisty thumpy space opera tale. If you start thinking that stories can be categorized into either pile, you'll end up writing either eventless character studies or plot-hammer symphonies starring one-dimensional nothings.