Next Wave!
Seems like everyone's getting in on the group-describing action.
We SH fiction editors have been saying for a while that it feels like there's a loose group of relatively new writers, clustered loosely around a set of magazines with somewhat overlapping tastes and approaches and flavors and sensibilities. We hadn't come up with a name for the group, and really it's too loose a group to even be called a group as such, but when the same names keep popping up in these ToCs, it starts to look like some kind of a movement. Even if not a Movement.
So then the astonishingly widely read Rich Horton posts his 2002 magazine summaries (that's the year 2002, though it also seemed like there were about 2,002 of them) (um, in case it's not clear, that's not derogatory; that's a mix of awe and envy) over on the sff.net newsgroups, and he comments like so about SH and our ilk:
I was tempted a while back to identify a "school" somewhat associated with Strange Horizons: a group of newish writers apparently much interested in what I might call "soft slipstream"—fantasy or near future SF (typically urbanish fantasy) with a mainstream flavor, conservative in telling, conservative in setting, with much interest in solid prose and good characterization. I would associate this school also with the webzine Ideomancer, the paper 'zine Say, arguably with the anthology Polyphony. Writers involved would be Jay Lake, Jennifer de Guzman, Christopher Barzak, Barth Anderson, Kristin Livdahl, Alan De Niro, M. L. Konett, and a few more. By the same token, it seems to me, I could identify "hard slipstream" as the rather wilder, not very mainstream or conservative at all, stuff published at Fantastic Metropolis, as well as at Leviathan.
(And by the way, in Rich's best-short-fiction summary, he lists "The Scent of Rotting Roses" in his novelettes list (his 19 top novelettes out of the 254 he read), and "The Cities of Myrkhyr" and "Travel Agency" on his short-stories list (his 32 top short stories out of the 1,019 he read). None of those three make his top-5 lists, so he won't be nominating any of them for Hugos, but it's still nice to see.)
I thought those comments were very interesting; I admit that I would kinda like us to be considered part of the "wilder" and less conservative school (especially because I'd like to consider Lady Churchill's as part of this loose cluster of publications, but partly just 'cause it sounds cooler than being part of the less-wild and more conservative school), but I have to admit that my tastes don't run to quite that experimental extreme of the spectrum. On the other hand, I adore some of the more experimental stuff we've published; I guess I've known for a while that I like things that are almost but not quite out in the margins; sort of in the suburbs of the margins.
(I might also add some other publications to the mix. Fuhu, for example, and probably some of the newer semipro webzines. I don't mean this to be an exclusive elite private "school"; if it's a movement, I think it's an inclusive one. So y'all who I fail to mention above or below, you're welcome too; too many cool folks to list.)
At any rate, so I'm buzzin' along thinkin' how cool we are now that we've gotten the attention of Cool Reviewer Guy, and then while looking for something else over at the Asimov's site just now I come across Jim Kelly's latest "On the Net" column, where he talks about his own first-pass approximation of the Next Wave, for which he's considering only writers who've appeared in Asimov's:
In order to make my Next Wave list, an Asimov's writer needs to have published in a major magazine or anthology no earlier than January, 2000.
He notes in passing that he's aware that this is a somewhat arbitrary designation, since it leaves out good new writers who haven't yet published in Asimov's such as: "Tobias Buckell, Charles Coleman Finlay, Theodora Goss, Naomi Kritzer, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Greg van Eekhout." All of whom I've met and/or corresponded with, and three of whom (so far) we've published.
Is that cool, or what? Can I bask in you folks' reflected glory?
But it gets better: Jim goes on to describe and discuss the websites of half a dozen new writers, including Barth Anderson, Alex Irvine, Mike Jasper, and Ruth Nestvold.
I'm going to take this opportunity to be just a wee bit smug. I know, I know, we don't get to take credit for talented writers submitting their work to us, and certainly not for their also selling stuff to Asimov's. But I'm still inordinately (literally) pleased to have so many of "our" writers (I admit I take a certain proprietary interest, no matter how inappropriate that may be) called out as being among the cool new generation of writers.
I should mention that I've often been impressed at how supportive Jim is of new writers (and, for that matter, of SH). Very cool; I hope when we're all as well-known as he is that we can be as nice about helping bring new people into the fold.