Strange Horizons publishes three reviews every week. That's at least a dozen reviews every month. More than a hundred and fifty a year. This, as far as I can tell, makes Strange Horizons the most prolific speculative fiction reviewing organ in existence, and competitive with a lot of professional, mainstream book reviews. It's still nowhere near enough space to cover all the books that are submitted for review, much less all of the books published in the field (whatever that means) each year. The editor's job, long before they start editing the reviews they do decide to publish, is deciding which books to cover and which reviews to commission, so it seems right that this should be the first question we discuss in this series.

As seems to happen quite often in discussions of genre or reviewing, the question of what to review boils down to a choice between prescriptive and descriptive. Is a reviews department a paper of record, reporting on the state of the genre and on the important names at its core, or is it a partisan platform, evangelizing for little-known writers and works and reflecting an inevitable editorial bias? Is its purpose to report on tastes, or to make them?

This is a huge, unwieldy question to which the answer, inevitably, is "yes." The reviews department should cover both the core of the field (again that fuzzy term) and its outskirts. It should take part in the conversation that surrounds the books that everyone is talking about (and hopefully contribute something new to it), and draw attention to the books that no one has noticed. This is all as obviously true as it is unhelpful. So let's break the question down to smaller components:

• Subgenres - Speculative fiction is an increasingly fragmented field, and different people mean entirely different things when they point to it. The popularity of various subgenres, such as urban fantasy and steampunk, has skyrocketed, and to cover them with anything resembling comprehensiveness would be to dedicate the department to them almost exclusively. On the other hand, to ignore these subgenres would also limit the magazine's definition of genre. So how do you choose which steampunk novel, which vampire romance—if any—to cover?
• Mainstream works - Genre elements have been gaining popularity outside of the field for the better part of a decade. These days it seems that a lot of writers are dipping their toes in the fantastic, or using the future to discuss the present. How many of these novels should be covered by Strange Horizons?
• Non-fiction - Strange Horizons has covered criticism and biography related to the speculative genres and that's something I hope to continue doing. Today's review, by Karen Burnham, is of a work of popular science, which I think is a first for the magazine. Should there be more such reviews?
• Older and Classic Works - How close to the contemporary should the department hew? Covering classic reprints is one thing, but what about older, but not yet classic, works?
• The Popular vs. the Obscure - How important is it for Strange Horizons to be yet another review venue covering the latest Brandon Sanderson, or the latest China Mieville? On the other hand, if a book is available in a limited print run, or is prohibitively expensive, is it worth covering? What about works in translation, which almost inevitably draw a smaller audience among English-language readers?
• Film, TV, and Comics - I think that the magazine's film and TV coverage manages to represent these mediums without allowing them to distract from the department's focus on written fiction. Meanwhile comics and graphic novels are hardly represented, mainly because I'm nowhere near literate enough in that medium to find the works worth covering.

It's tempting to answer all of these questions, once again, with "yes." The reviews department should cover the popular and the obscure, focus on books while giving other mediums their space, highlight works in translation and non-fiction. But leaving aside the practical issues that prevent this, I'm not sure that such a wide-ranging department would even be desirable. It's a good thing, I think, for the department to have its own voice, its own priorities, and its own tastes—and if the 2010 reviewers' roundup, in which Ian McDonald's The Dervish House was the hands-down favorite, and Inception received a resounding "meh," is any indication, those tastes are nowhere near the center of the genre. But of course, now it's my job to influence and direct the department's emphasis—hence the questions above. What are your thoughts? What questions am I missing?