Bewildering Stories News

Bewildering Stories and the frontière invisible

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Congratulations to Cecilia Wennerström! Her novel Saga of Rim: the Land on the Rim of Time has won the 2003 Dream Realm Award in the young adults category. Cecilia’s biographical sketch has been very colorfully redecorated in her honor.

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Till now, Jerry and I have made no formal guidelines about issue sizes. As a general rule we’ve gone with what seemed appropriate as soon as we could. That policy of studied informality worked well in Year 1; it began to show signs of strain in the second half of Year 2; now we’re having growing pains, and it’s time to reorganize. We’re going to have to publish guidelines about issue sizes and establish a formal queue. We think we’ll be doing our contributors a favor by letting them know what to expect.

Some speculations about causes:

Obviously, “going frameless” made a tremendous difference, for reasons we discussed at the time, back in issue 90 and elsewhere.
Another may be that Bewildering Stories has — or ought to have — a reputation for careful editing, prompt feedback, and respect for authors. We’re far from perfect and do make mistakes, but at least the intent has always been there. And we’re very happy with the generally similar response from our contributors.
Another reason: Bewildering Stories is becoming known in the world for accepting submissions in English as a second language. And that’s where the editing comes in: works by some very esteemed authors would almost certainly never have seen the light of day without it.
A related reason: you’re seeing the “global village” in action. Of the ten authors represented in issue 112, half of them live outside North America. Of them, four are writing in English as a second language. We think that’s commendable and, frankly, quite normal. Our basic editorial policy remains simply this: we take what’s good as it comes to us, wherever and whomever it comes from.

Our link exchange with Alfa Eridani has brought us good fortune. One mention on the magazine’s bulletin board “Comunidad SF” has brought us Omar Vega, Adriana de Zadra and others, as well.

We’ve had friendly contacts with the webmaster of Neophyction, in France, and with Fermín Moreno González, the editor of SABLE, in Saragossa, Spain. Our object is to transcend what Sébastien, the webmaster of Neophyction, calls the frontière invisible — glass wall — between Europe and North America. With any luck we may be able to arrange text exchanges and author referrals. For example, Fermín says that he receives many submissions from Europe that are too long for SABLE but may be of interest to us. In exchange, I’m trying to find stories of ours that may interest him and his readers and would be suitable for translation into Spanish. Any suggestions? Please let us know or write directly to Fermín. Our new Anthologies page may serve as a handy reference.

Inspired by our link exchanges with Argentina, England, Finland, Spain, Sweden and Russia, I’ve tried searching for webzines in Quebec. Aside from the website of the venerable magazine Solaris, there seem to be few like ours. Anyway, I hope to have better luck with a list of websites sent me by a friend in France.

And that raises other questions: How many other webzines compare to Bewildering Stories? How many publish weekly? How many publish long works? How many pay their authors, much as we would like to? How are they funded? Where are they? Jerry, our man about the Net, reports that Google ranks Bewildering Stories at a respectable 5 out of 10. Now, readers, tell us what you think: how can we “go for the gold”? How might we best collaborate with our colleagues in the world that is our home?

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