Five years!
Strange Horizons launched on September 1, 2000. (After about nine months of planning—and at the end of one of the worst weeks of my life, but I'm not gonna dwell on that here.)
For the past five years, the amazing 30-person all-volunteer staff has published new material every week, on time. The only weeks we haven't published have been a vacation week at the end of each year.
Material we've published has won awards and other recognition; authors whose first stories we've published have gone on to make names for themselves; we've weathered a site redesign and a forum-system change and a SFWA rate change; we've sponsored workshops and encouraged new writers and helped some established but unjustly unknown authors find a somewhat wider audience. We've published science articles, book reviews, art galleries, poetry, columns, editorials, history articles, illustrations, interviews, criticism, movie reviews, music galleries, computer-game reviews, and fiction, among other things. We've received over 11,000 fiction submissions, from over 5000 authors, and we've published roughly 250 stories. We've been nominated for a Hugo award for Best Website twice. When you Google for [online speculative fiction magazine], we're the first search result.
It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of fun. I've met a bunch of great people through the magazine, and we've gotten to publish a whole lot of great work by a whole lot of talented writers and artists. This fiction editing thing, it's one of the things I always wanted to do, all my life, but I probably would never have gotten a chance to do it if not for SH.
So, thanks for founding the magazine, Mary Anne! (And for asking me to be a fiction editor.)
And thanks for keeping it running smoothly since M stepped down, Susan!
And thanks again to the ongoing and too-often-unsung dedicated hard work of the staff and the contributors.
It's been a pleasure and an honor to work on this magazine for the past five years. I'm looking forward to the next five.
