At the Glasgow WorldCon earlier this month, the 80+ members of our editorial collective, scattered around the world, experienced a novel sensation: at the Hugo Awards ceremony, after the nominees for the best semiprozine were announced, the sealed envelope opened, and the dramatic moment’s pause accomplished, the name that was read out was … Strange Horizons.
Until this year, Strange Horizons had been a losing finalist at the Hugos every year since 2013. As you can probably guess, our fate at the Hugos has been the subject of long-running in-jokes and gags within the magazine, on our internal Slack group. But an albatross around the neck is still an albatross, even though it might have a sunny disposition and crack witty jokes; and it is always a relief to unburden oneself of the said avian.
With that said, we want to take this opportunity to reaffirm a few things.
The first is our gratitude to the SF community, to the voters, and to our readers, without whom we would not exist. Awards are, of course, subjective, but they tell us that the work we do is seen and appreciated by the community that we are a part of. They are an important reminder that a space such as this holds meaning and value. So, thank you.
The second is our gratitude to all our writers - without you too, we (literally!) would not exist: thank you for trusting us with your work, and we hope you’ll continue to trust us in the future.
The third is our gratitude and appreciation to all the other zines that together make this space what it is. Some were companions on the Hugo ballot, others were companions on the longlist released after the Awards, but neither the shortlist nor the longlist reflects the breadth, diversity, and richness of the SF magazine space. Awards, by their very nature, are competitive; but the space that we exist in is defined by its camaraderie, cooperation, and collaboration: from something as basic as coordinating our fund-drive periods so that they don’t overlap, to sharing staff members and, of course, writers. Please support your SF zines: it’s a difficult time; and we hope that award ballots reflect the incredible range of SF magazines active today.
The fourth is our gratitude to all the members of the Strange Horizons collective, past and present. In a few months, Strange Horizons will turn 25 years old (we began in 2000!). And if there is one thing that has defined its internal structure, it has been ceaseless motion. We do not have a fixed editorial board—we do not even have an editor-in-chief! What we do have is an editorial collective that is made up of different autonomous departments; and this is a collective whose membership is fluid (think of us as a mycelial network, perhaps!). So, when you’re thinking of Strange Horizons, you’re thinking not of one individual or ten, or even of our current masthead, but every person over the last twenty-five years that has made this magazine what it is. Thank you!
Our membership is fluid, and it is also international: our staff comes from nine different countries on multiple continents, spanning almost the entire globe in terms of time zones. We hope that this reflects in our editorial choices, in the fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art that we select. One thing that we have always prided itself on is the diversity both of our editorial collective and of the work that we publish (go check out our geographically-focused special issues!). We love how many writers count us as their “first,” and we hope that many more will do that in the years to come. We also hope to continue being a magazine that gives equal space to all forms of SF: the short story, the novelette, the poem, the prose poem, the article, the column, the review, the critical essay, and much else.
At Strange Horizons, we have always understood SF - like all other forms of art - to be intensely political. We have tried to centre our collective politics around the ideas of liberation and equality. To this end, and in light of what is going on around us, we read out a brief statement on Palestine at the Hugo Awards ceremony. This statement was first prepared in 2021, in consultation with Palestinian artists, and we reiterate that.
And finally, a reminder: soon we will be celebrating our twenty-fifth birthday. In human terms, this is about the time when the prefrontal cortex becomes fully developed. In magazine terms, we don’t know what that might mean, but we do have a lot of stuff planned for our silver jubilee year—watch this space!