Slush readers
It seems to me that until pretty recently, the sf world liked to pretend there was no such thing as slush readers.
Even now, most of the pro editors don't seem to like to talk about it. Writers who hang out in online sf forums quickly learn that some of the pro magazines have first-readers who screen all incoming stories, passing along the best stories to the official editors of the magazines, but I suspect that writers who don't hang out online might not be so aware of it, and I strongly suspect that most readers aren't aware of it at all. (Not that it's so relevant to readers, except inasmuch as I imagine it does have at least a little effect on what gets published.)
Still, it's becoming more open and less of an open secret all the time. Part of that is because Carina Gonzalez (former slush reader for Realms of Fantasy) has been a high-profile participant at the Rumor Mill for some time (and she maintained a site, very popular among authors, that showed the current status of stories she'd received); more recently, the renowned John Joseph Adams (slush reader for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) started an online journal (happy birthday yesterday, JJA!), and Douglas Cohen (new slush reader for Realms of Fantasy) started a forum topic for himself at the Rumor Mill.
So that accounts for two of the big four print prozines. And I found out a while back that Kelly Link is the first reader for Sci Fiction, though she's lower-profile about it. What I didn't know until sometime last year, I think, is that Asimov's and Analog also employ slush readers: Brian Bieniowski and Trevor Quachri, respectively. I had always been under the strong impression that the editors of those magazines saw every story submitted to them; turns out not to be true.
And I gather that Jetse de Vries acts as first reader for Interzone (and possibly The Third Alternative/Black Static too, I'm not sure). So most of the SFWA-qualifying prozines employ first readers of one sort or another. (And I know various online semiprozines do as well, and I just learned that Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet now has slush-reading interns.)
I should note that I'm not sure of the official job titles of most of these folks; I think they're generally called "assistant editor" or "associate editor" or some such on the masthead, if they appear there at all. And they sometimes have a host of other editorial duties in addition to reading slush.
Anyway, JJA has started interviewing other slush readers. See his interviews with Douglas Cohen, Kelly Link, and Brian Bieniowski.
I'm really pleased to see such folks getting more attention. It seems to me that reading slush can be a pretty thankless job, and that the people who do it should get more recognition for their work than they generally do.
Yay for slush readers!
(And for those of you asking, "If slush readers are so cool, why doesn't SH have one?", the answer boils down to "Because Jed is a control freak." There's a fair bit more to my answer than that—among other things, our editorial structure and approach are significantly different from those of the other prozines, given that we have three fiction editors—but really, I think the control freak thing mostly covers it.)
One interesting aspect of the slush-reading process is that some editors have criteria for authors who bypass the process. Some editors ask their slush readers to automatically pass along any story by an author who's been to a major workshop, like Clarion; some editors automatically read any story by an author who they've bought from before; some editors have other such criteria. In her interview, Kelly notes that Ellen picks through the slush before handing it off to Kelly; Kelly then reads through it and gives about a dozen stories a month back to Ellen; Ellen has apparently only published a total of two of those stories that Kelly read first.
My other biggest surprise in these interviews was learning that Brian B does all the editing of the stories bought by Asimov's. But I'm not sure how seriously to take that comment, and anyway that's another topic for another time.
