Recruiting for Strange Horizons can be tough, but exciting—and humbling, when I stop to think about the calibre of people willing to donate their time to this magazine. We're in the middle of recruiting two new poetry editors at the moment, and as usual it's an agonising process. But when we find the right person, it's an excellent feeling.
All of which is the long way around to saying that as of this week we're delighted to welcome Lila Garrott as a fiction editor. Lila has published stories in Not One of Us and Cabinet des Fées, and poetry in Jabberwocky and Mythic Delirium (and here), but I know them first as a critic: they've reviewed for us regularly and brilliantly since 2011, as well as writing for Tor.com and for Publishers Weekly, and blogging at rushthatspeaks.dreamwidth.org. They're a seriously smart reader of SF, is what I'm saying, and I'm excited to read the stories they help to choose.
This is usually the point at which I bid a sad farewell to one of the existing fiction editors, but not this time—or at least, not yet. Julia Rios is planning to step down later this year, after three years doing amazing work for the magazine; more, in many ways, than her role strictly demands, and I will miss her greatly. (Although bigger and better things surely won't be long in coming: if you haven't picked up Kaleidoscope yet, you should, plus the imminent first instalment of The Year's Best YA Speculative Fiction, both co-edited with Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press.) For now, however, it's business as usual, but with four fiction editors instead of three.
On another note, last Friday brought the pleasant news that the symposium on British SF that we published last July has been shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction. Many thanks to Juliet E. McKenna, Kari Sperring, Nina Allan, Dan Hartland, Martin Lewis and Maureen Kincaid Speller for their essays, good luck to the other shortlistees, and if you haven't read it yet—well go, and enjoy