Editorial

Bleeding genres in myth, legend, and science fiction

Bleeding of Genres: Myth and Legend

BY J.J.S. Boyce

We’re all swimming in culture, all of the time. Humans are natural story-tellers. Even on an individual level we have those defining stories of the time we did X or saw Y. And any fictional world that is expected to be taken seriously, whose inhabitants are to be accepted as real people, must have its own stories and art and culture and political views. It’s not enough to make a passing mention of it. We need to see some of it.

Funny Thing About the Hugos

Funny Thing About the Hugos

BY AE

The 59th annual Hugo Awards were presented last week at LoneStarCon in San Antonio Texas. The award for Best Novel went to former SFWA President John Scalzi’s Redshirts and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer went to Mur Lafferty, presumably on the weight of The Shambling Guide to New York City. Now, the Hugos are decided by public vote, so there is a certain shift in the base of judges every year but, nonetheless, these selections are noteworthy.

To read is human, but to skim ...

Over the Transom: The Parts That People Skip

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

It seems that every few weeks someone writes a piece about why agents will stop reading your manuscript, often within the first few sentences. It doesn’t seem fair, and perhaps it isn’t, but these are readers with a finely honed sense of what works — or more precisely, what they can sell — and they know that no one with buying power gets any more forgiving further downstream from them.

AE #11

Letter from the Editors #11

BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Welcome back for Issue 11. AE continues to grow and we are doing our best to manage without too many visible growing pains or too much premature aging for our editorial staff. Without dwelling too much on statistics, our readership (as estimated by monthly unique non-automated visitors) is more than three times what it was one year ago. And in April 2012, our readership was nearly three times what it was in April 2011.

AE #9

Letter from the Editors #9

BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Earlier this year, AE was officially accredited as a professional market by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. There are fewer than thirty publications worldwide so recognized, placing us in such rarefied company as Asimov’s, Analog and Canada’s own ChiZine. More and more of these markets are offering their stories for free online, as AE does, but thus far we are the only professional market to embrace Creative Commons licensing (or any similar model).