Twenty years ago, Mary Anne Mohanraj and her crew founded Strange Horizons with the idea of publishing new and underrepresented voices. On a “museum model” of grants and donations, no less. Told this approach would never work, dismissed because they were online instead of print, they nonetheless set a standard for publishing the new and wonderfully odd.
Twenty years is a long time, and so many of our readers and contributors, artists and editors, have overlapped, rolling in and out like tides. I have asked the departments to look back and look ahead, to find a sense of what SH should be. This is that issue.
Strange Horizons today is a global composite. From Delhi to London, Baltimore to Singapore, we’ll probably never all sit down in the same room, but we’re united by a broad and consistently interrogated vision of SF. Since I became EIC, I’ve had time to interrogate my own vision of Strange Horizons, and where I want to see it go. My first zine-wide work was the trans / nonbinary special, the marginalization closest to my own experience, and I’ve found the most joy since in feeling how wide-flung our collective arms can reach, in seeing the inclusive and imaginative initiatives of our team, in knowing that what we come up with when we put our minds together will be the better for our conversation.
As to that conversation, all I want is for you to join it. I want to say specifically to my trans siblings, we welcome your stories. Nigerian creators, Palestinian writers and artists, Malaysian visionaries, we welcome your stories. To Mexican writers—yes, that includes indigenous Mexican writers and the diaspora—we have an open call until August 31st: this is your last day. Please send us your words. This year of crisis and revolution, Strange Horizons is receiving more of your stories, poems, and nonfiction than ever. Thank you for thinking of us and celebrating our part in the global SF community.