It's been listed as one of the rewards in this year's fund drive from the start:
Everyone who donates at least $10 by any route (including Patreon, at any level) will also receive an eBook copy of Strange Horizons: The First Fifteen Years at the end of the fund drive. This ebook includes stories by Elizabeth Bear, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Vandana Singh, and many others, plus a history of the magazine.
But we thought it was time to give you some more details: specifically, the cover and table of contents!
That rather lovely cover has been created by one of our excellent art directors, Heather McDougal, based around an image by Frank Fox.
The ebook itself includes 15 stories and 7 poems -- some well-known, some lesser-known, all of them favourites of current or past editors -- from, as the title says, the first fifteen years of the magazine. It was utterly agonizing trying to filter 800+ stories and poems into that thimble, and there are any number of writers I can't quite believe are not in the book. But on the other hand, the selection that are in the book are all among the best of the magazine's output, and collectively, I think, give at least a flavour of what we've been up to here. (Albeit with no non-fiction! Maybe a project for a future year...)
Anyway, after all that agonizing, here's what we've ended up with:
Stories
"Two Dreams on Trains" by Elizabeth Bear
"The Grinnell Method" by Molly Gloss
"We Are Never Where We Are" by Gavin J Grant
“Down the Well”, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
“Beautiful White Bodies”, by Alice Sola Kim
“Start with Color”, by Bill Kte’pi
“The Algorithms for Love”, by Ken Liu
“Inventory”, by Carmen Maria Machado
“WE HEART VAMPIRES!!!!!!”, by Meghan McCarron
“Walking Hibernation”, by Joanne Merriam
“Saltwater Economics”, by Jack Mierzwa
“Little Gods”, by Tim Pratt
“Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs”, by Leonard Richardson
“The House Beyond Your Sky”, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Three Tales from Sky River”, by Vandana Singh
“Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas”, by Alberto Yáñez
Poems
“Chagall’s Lamp”, by Mike Allen
“Dsonoqua on Lewis, The Outer Hebrides”, by Neile Graham
“Between the Mountain and the Moon”, by Rose Lemberg
“Rural Blessings”, by Pam McNew
“How to Bake a Cake from Scratch”, by Lisa Nohealani Morton
“Seeds”, by M Sereno
“Full Metal Hanuman”, by Bryan Thao Worra
There might be one or two more pieces that sneak in before the end of the fund drive, we'll see. As an added bonus, about two-thirds of the pieces also come with new afterwords by the authors -- and I'm currently putting together a big oral history of the magazine, with contributions from dozens of former and current staff. The story of SH has never been collected in this before; it feels like it was about time.
So there you have it -- yet another reason to donate this year, along with the prize draw, and all our bonus material, and (hopefully not least of the reasons) another full year of SH. We're getting close to 50% of our goal, and we've got just over two weeks left! Every little helps. Thanks.