In this special episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Kat Kourbeti sits down with fiction editors Hebe Stanton and Kat Weaver, as well as poetry and administrative editor Romie Stott, to talk about some of the work we published last year, just as the Hugo nominations deadline draws close.

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Episode show notes:

• Read the full Azimuth post including all links to today's recommendations, plus some extras for good measure.
• Follow Romie Stott on Bluesky
• Read Hebe Stanton's SFF review blog
• Follow Kat Weaver on Bluesky
• Follow Kat Kourbeti on Bluesky

And of course, find a fuller list of what we talked about today as you read the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to a special episode of Strange Horizons at 25. I'm your host Kat Kourbeti, and while on this podcast we tend to talk about older works published during our 25 years of existence, it is early March and the Hugo nominations deadline is around the corner. So we wanted to bring some attention to some of the fiction and poetry that we published in 2024, to help nudge you to fill your Hugo Awards ballot and to get some insight into how our different departments work along the way.

I am here with a few of the editors of the fiction and poetry departments. Please introduce yourselves.

Hebe Stanton: Hi, I'm Hebe Stanton. I'm one of the fiction editors and I also sporadically blog about science fiction on my blog.

Kat Kourbeti: Which is a great blog, by the way.

Hebe Stanton: Thank you.

Kat Weaver: I'm Kat Weaver. I am also one of the fiction editors at Strange Horizons.

Romie Stott: And I'm Romie Stott. I'm one of the poetry editors, and I'm also getting over a pretty brutal cold. So I'm gonna be growlier and slower than usual.

Kat Kourbeti: That's okay. We're not looking for speed. We're looking for your insight. Thank you all so much for joining me today.

So first of all, this is a first on this podcast, to have some of the editors join in. First of all, I kind of wanna ask how was 2024 for you publishing wise?

I know that for a lot of magazines it's been difficult in the last kind of year or two with AI submissions and things like that. How has our submissions queue looked in the last little bit?

Hebe Stanton: I feel that because of the way the fiction department works, we open for very limited periods and have caps on our submissions, we're not really a good target for AI spammers. It's not really particularly a return on spamming to us. I think I've only actually seen one AI story since AI became a thing, which obviously we're very lucky about, 'cause it has been a major problem for other magazines obviously, but I dunno what it's like in poetry.

Romie Stott: We are open continuously. But I haven't noticed a big flood of AI submissions. I think our rate of submissions is pretty similar to what it's always been, but that rate is very high. We receive a lot of poetry submissions, and you can tell whether they're coming from people who read, not just our magazine, but like speculative fiction magazines in general.

We will also sometimes get huge influxes of poems where it's clearly a high school got an assignment or it got posted on a message board in a particular country, I will suddenly get a ton of submissions, because we are very friendly to international submissions, and we are very friendly to new poets and offer a fairly friendly amount of feedback.

We will not workshop your poem for you. That would cost money. We are volunteers working for free. But we always get a lot of submissions, and a certain percentage will be inappropriate, but still by people who are interested in showing us their poems. Like it's not people trying to get rich off of poetry because that doesn't happen.

Hebe Stanton: Did you you see your poetry submissions go up last year? Because certainly the last window we opened, we hit our cap extremely quickly. I think it was just over 24 hours, which has not happened before. And I dunno what's behind that really. I dunno if it's closures in other parts of the sector or, yeah. I just wondered if you'd seen something like that.

Romie Stott: No, I think we've seen a really similar level of submissions, but that's partially because of how high our submissions rate got during the pandemic. During all of the shutdowns, a lot of people were staying home writing poems, so we shot up and we've stayed that high.

Kat Kourbeti: Which is interesting and I would say it's probably like a net positive for poetry, generally speaking. But more work for you.

Romie Stott: I would say the internet in general yes, has been a boon for poetry, because it's very easy to share a poem online and it's very easy to read a poem, as a way to rejuvenate yourself while you're on a five minute break at work or while you're riding the bus. So yeah, I would say poems are being shared more broadly than I would ever have expected.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's very cool. I don't know if any of you have heard the episode with Brandon O'Brien that at the time of recording was the latest interview, but he's been talking a lot about the fact that poetry can be accessible, and people tend to reach for that a little bit right now, which is nice.

Romie Stott: I'd say something that we're really starting to see in science fiction and fantasy awards as well, it's starting to be added to consideration for Hugos or Nebula or for membership in the SFWA. Poetry's kind of its separate literary thing, but now there's more of a "no, this is actually an important piece of writing that we care about". There's less of the, "I never read poetry". It used to be, you'd maybe have somebody sing a song in the middle of a story, but speculative poetry has really come into its own.

Hebe Stanton: I feel like the internet in general has been good for the accessibility of works that aren't novels in the sort of spec fic space. I always find it really nice when I'm talking about authors to my friends, and I'm like you can just go and read their work for free a lot of the time. And I think that it just really helped open up those other forms. Like obviously science fiction has already always been built on the short story, but it's just so much more widely accessible than a hard copy anthology or a hard copy collection. And I really like being able to introduce people to new authors and the possibilities of the short story form, which are very different to that of a novel.

Romie Stott: Yeah, it's a huge change from even, I'd say 10 years ago. Obviously Strange Horizons has been publishing in the online space for 25 years. And we have had other magazines come and go, but the discoverability has gotten better where you will see like short story roundups to where I don't necessarily have to be reading all of the magazines all the time. There are recommendation lists, there are things that go viral, and I can find them really easily.

Kat Kourbeti: Have you noticed, as editors that maybe some things get spikes of attention on Strange Horizons? Has there been stuff like that within the last year?

Hebe Stanton: To be honest, I'm not really on social media, so I dunno the answer to this question, but it certainly is nice when stories get picked up in roundups on places like Locus. And that's just, it's just very nice to be like, yes.

Kat Weaver: Yeah. I am also not super on social media very much, like I don't know when a story is receiving a lot of shares, but like I do try to make an effort if a story I've worked on or if an author I've worked with is promoting their story, I will repost it as well just to give them that extra boost, even though I'm not very online. I think first of all, it's nice to share something that you had a hand in working on, but then also to help promote the author.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, my favorite things that I've experienced is the kind of camaraderie that I have with some of the authors whose stories I've narrated, whether it's on Strange Horizons or elsewhere. There's like a, "Hey, I worked on this thing. It's not mine per se, but I helped make it into something." And we're always promoting that together. And that friendship that I have with some of the authors that I've worked with is really special.

I think the first story that I ever narrated for Strange Horizons, the author now lives in London. And so we were like, oh my God, you're here. We should hang out. On that note, Cat Aquino, we need to hang out. I hope you're listening.

I wanna ask, what is the timeframe for a story in Strange Horizons from slush to like publication? How far out are you guys working? Especially in fiction and poetry.

Hebe Stanton: At the moment in fiction, the timelines are quite short. So from when we accept a story, it might be a month, probably no more than that, that we're turning around the story.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. That's pretty great actually. But that means that you're probably reading constantly, and constantly kinda looking at things as they come in.

Hebe Stanton: Because we do it window by window, we're not constantly open. So it's a case of going through each batch of stories as they come in.

Kat Kourbeti: And is there anything—this is for Hebe and Kat in particular—is there anything in particular that you personally, as editors tend to look for in a story that makes you go, "ah, yes, this is for me".

Kat Weaver: So I think by now all of us editors, we have a very solid idea of our own tastes, but we also have an idea of our fellow editors' tastes. So sometimes we'll read a story and we'll bump it up to the rest of the editors and we'll be like, "this story wasn't for me, but this feels like one of you might be the person to work on this story".

Hebe Stanton: Yeah, I think for me, what I like is a sense of abundance. I like to feel that there's a created world or just the author's world or the character's world that I can enter into and feel that it's full. I personally love a slightly baggy story, although I know that's not everybody's taste on the team.

Kat Weaver: Yeah, I also enjoy long stories, reading them, but as far as editing goes, I tend to like stories that are very precise and considered, about both their use of language and their use of structure.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh, I love those words. Do you have an example of something that's precise and considered?

Kat Weaver: So that is an excellent lead in to I think one of the most interesting stories that I worked on structurally, it was Vermilion by Victor Forna published April 2nd 2024. And that one is, it's prose is extremely poetic, but the structure and how the characters progress on their journey, through one part of the planet to the other and the way it's broken up and the way the formatting, like the poetry of the narrators state, works with the blocks of text as they progress through this science fictional planet and the landmarks, was extremely interesting to me. And it does make the piece feel more poetic in a sense, almost too. Like you have these prose poems as you progress from one part of the planet to the other.

Kat Kourbeti: That's awesome. And yeah, very unique. I think we have a tendency at Strange Horizons to play around with that sort of thing. And I wonder if that's your kind of mark on that, 'cause those are a lot of the stories that I've enjoyed where it's like, something strange is going on here with the structure, or with the format, and it's unusual and I love those, so that's very cool.

What about you Hebe? We are moving into kind of the main part of the episode, which is recommendations and thoughts about various stories we published last year. It's a bit of a free for all.

Hebe Stanton: Yeah. So for me, the story that I wanna shout about is The Spindle of Necessity by B. Pladek, which I've told my friends that it is a story about transness as navigated through that one piece of media that only you really care about. Which I think is in the experience that a lot of people in science fiction have.

And I think what's wonderful about this story is that I guess it illustrates what I was talking about, the sense of abundance. It's so rich and complex. It's doing so many things on so many different levels. It's about that experience with a piece of media that you really love. And it's also about the questions that many queer people have about their identities and whether they're, quote unquote valid. And whether you can ever have that sort of external validation, that you are valid as a person. I just, every time I reread it, I see something new in it and it changes and I just think it's fantastic.

Kat Kourbeti: I wanna second that. I love that story very much. And is this something that you edited, Hebe?

Hebe Stanton: Yes it is.

Kat Kourbeti: Awesome.

Hebe Stanton: Yeah. And I think something that I really enjoyed was also the language of it, the relationship that the protagonist has to the piece of media by an author from the fifties who wrote gay fiction. She's a Mary Reynold character. It evokes that sort of wistfulness that I think you see in a lot of fiction from that period. And that sort of bittersweetness, that sort of melancholy is probably one of my favorite emotions to have when I'm reading a story.

Kat Weaver: I also want to give a shout out to I think my personal favorite story that I worked on last year which is Bride Butcher Doe by Lowry Poletti, that was 19th of August. And this one is a novelette. And we haven't published too many novelettes. I think there's only a couple others from this year. The other novelette is Aquarium for Lost Souls, I think it was, and then the third was Premee's story, By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars. That was Premee's fundraiser story drive. But Bride Butcher Doe, that one immediately caught me. I told a bunch of people about this story, I was just like, you guys have to read this unicorn story.

But what I love about it, first of all is its use of language is so contrasting. So you have almost three modes that the story is working in. You have this like really medicalized mode, cause the main character is working on like dissections and is a scientist. So you have that really medical voice, and then you also have the fantasy voice where you get like glimpses of oh, there's a king, there's a court, there's ladies and princesses. And then you also have this like modern humorous tone too, 'cause they're also all texting. The character listens to EDM. It's fascinating. All these registers that the story moves back and forth between, and that, even just beyond the subject matter, I thought that was just delightful.

Kat Kourbeti: Yes. And in fact, to go back to what you were saying earlier about novelettes, I love it when it turns out one of our stories is a novelette because it's just such a difficult length to publish. And so then when something comes along and it's like, oh, hey, it's over seven and a half thousand words... Love when we can place a story like that, it's really cool.

Romie, what about poetry now? As poetry editor, you're not the only one who's working on, like publishing poems. There's a handful of you. How do you guys navigate working together? I think you have more of a collaborative process in the poetry department, if I'm not mistaken.

Romie Stott: Actually we have an anti collaborative process.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh.

Romie Stott: We are each completely allowed to make our own decisions and nobody has any kind of override over it. We do not confer with each other at all. Yes, each of us we hand off reading different reading periods, and obviously we like and respect each other or we wouldn't be working together.

But we have to ultimately each trust our own sense of taste completely. And this kind of goes back to an earlier question that you were asking about, having a sense of when something goes viral or is popular. Aside from being one of the poetry editors, I am the administrative editor of Strange Horizons, which is a deliberately pretty vague title, but one of the things it means is I am the person who has access to the analytics. And I avoid looking at what's popular.

And part of that is laziness because most of the analytics tools are really geared toward people who are selling things online, who are selling products to be like, which T-shirt do we need to make more of? And we don't do that. So all of the tools you really have to fight with to actually get the information that I would want.

Plus the fact that we have readers that are reading our entire archive. Our five most popular pages from the last year were not published in 2024. One of them was published at the tail end of 2023.

So just if you're curious, our top five most popular pieces on the website in 2024 were:

• The Ghost Did What, from November 2023, which is about translation.
• Kirk Drift from 2017.
• Tomorrow is Waiting, from 2011.
• Good Hunting by Ken Liu from 2012.
• And Selkie Stories are for Losers by Sophia Samatar from 2013.

So things do keep getting read. So it's also, like, I would have to go through a lot of pages before I could figure out what from 2024 really hit.

But it's also an ideological idea, that we bring this group of editors together because of their taste. When I trust an imprint, when I trust a magazine, it's because I'm trusting the selections of the curators, and we run the poetry department that exact same way.

Essentially when we talk with each other, it will frequently be about something like, how to handle a bad response to a rejection, or how to format a particularly tricky poem because we're all also galleying our own poems, and poetry formatting is not really what HTML is optimized for. So we're frequently having to figure out workarounds to be like how do I get this to indent? How do I get it to change font size midway through? All of this kind of thing, while also still being accessible to screen readers.

So a lot of our chat is more technical, and otherwise we leave each other alone other than to be like, ah, good job. I liked that. So that does make it a little bit difficult for me to speak for the department as a whole.

I can mostly speak to the poems that I accepted myself and also some other poems that I'm just a fan of. Although this is a really exciting year in the sense that, 2025 is, I believe the first time a Hugo for poetry is going to be given out. I don't know the whole history of the Hugos. It might have happened and gone away before, but I think this is the first one.

Kat Kourbeti: I don't think there's ever been like a dedicated, this is the first time that it's been in the Hugo Awards. Other awards might have had a different relationship with the medium, but yeah, it is very exciting. It's very fun.

Romie Stott: Yeah, my usual very not helpful response is that "all of our poems are wonderful and you should read all of them". It's not like it takes that long.

Kat Kourbeti: I do want to stress, generally speaking, and I've put this in the text for the Azimuth post that will accompany this podcast is that it is very much not an endorsement of one thing over another. I know we're talking about specific poems and specific stories in this episode, and we will put some links to things, but it doesn't mean that any of the other works that we published over the last year are any less worthy of considerations.

Romie Stott: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: By all means go through the archive. Read whatever you want. It's all eligible, please, and thank you. We would love to see stuff on the ballot that's from here.

Romie Stott: And I am gonna give some suggestions. It is just, I think with poetry especially, it's similar to music in the sense of you read something and it connects with you, and it's about seeing that thing at that moment that you needed.

So one poem that I really loved was called Lotus Descends to Visit Nova. And that's also worth looking at just because it has a stunning illustration attached. And it's a longer poem; we often publish quite short poems, but it's a full poem that is the story of a character riding through a cyber punk underground train, but reminiscing about somebody that they miss. And it's just beautiful. All of the emotion is very felt, but also the imagery is outstanding. It does create its own world that you can escape into, which I think is a real triumph and is something that many of us turn to speculative fiction for, is being able to have this sense of entering another world. And this poem absolutely provides that. So I think, even if you're somebody who's not always interested in reading poetry this has substance to it, and I think would probably still appeal to you.

Another poem that I was impressed with this year is called The Lantern Runner. And again, it's a poem that does tell a story. It tells a pretty complex narrative with a beginning and a middle and an end, but it is doing it in a double sestina format. And the sestina as a form is one that basically you pick essentially like six words, that are repeating in different frequencies that are prescribed throughout the poem. So it has a sense of structure, and it has some degree of rhyme and it has a pretty intense rhythm to it. And so for somebody to be able to within that also tell a story that moves forward instead of just looping back on itself all the time is really wonderful. And it provides, in the case of this poem, a real sense of destiny, of here is somebody who was chosen to do this, and it is working through to the point when the prophecy thing happens. It's just an excellent use of a structure to reinforce an idea that's also important to the narrative. And again, it's just also impressive from a craft standpoint.

Another of the poems that I liked is called One Large Deep Fried Thistle Burr. It's not as flashy as the other two that I just mentioned. But it is just imagining a near future in which there is basically a disease that makes plants at large, really dangerous to eat, to where humans just can't really digest plants anymore. And how much of an adjustment that is, and how that means that instead of animal products being a luxury, plant products or this extreme luxury, to where this person is salivating just imagining even being able to eat a thistle, which is not something one would normally want to eat. And I think it's really well realized. Aside from the inherent science fiction story of it, which is interesting to consider, I think it connects with me emotionally because we're at a moment in the world, maybe we always are, but there's a sense of things that you relied on, maybe going away and maybe not ever coming back. And it's an indirect way of being able to think through some of the grief around that.

And along those lines, another poem that I personally found extremely comforting is called Interstellar Assistance. And that's a type of poem that is sometimes called a patchwork poem or a cento, or an assembly poem. It's all taken from lines in a manual of shipping distress signals that are then rearranged into a poem that's telling a story about a craft that's lost in an asteroid field, and that has significant mechanical damage and is calling to this other ship, which is radioing back, how they can find each other. And I find it so moving because it's sending this idea into the future and into this space of imagination, but it's also drawing on things that people have said to each other in disaster situations across decades. And it provides that handshake across time, that idea that there's always a way to call for help, and there's always people who are trained in how to respond, and that we can learn to be either of those.

And then I guess finally, the other three poems that I would mention are Gold Foil Experiment, which we often publish poems that are not about science fiction or fantasy, but are drawing on actual science that happened. So the gold foil experiment was an actual experiment, and as we often do, we are interested in a poem that relates that to someone's personal life and kind of makes it embodied and relevant and personal.

We also liked the poem, Why is the Forest Lonely? And I liked the poem The Same Fur Coat, which is one of the less expressly science fiction or fantasy poems that we have run. It's more of a slipstream piece of kind of the sense of when you find an object and are imagining its history and have a sense of its magic, but it is partially about the fantasies that you have for yourself or the fantasies of how you imagine the rest of the world.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. A lot of these sound incredible. And I haven't read all of them, so I will be checking these out. To go back to what you were saying earlier about your department not necessarily being focused on collaboration, that's very funny, 'cause that's what Brandon O'Brien thought you were doing. He was like, oh well, multiple poets would've read my work, so if they published me then, they all must have agreed. And actually it turns out it was probably just one person.

Romie Stott: With that said, we do actually have fairly similar tastes. I mean, we have different tastes; I always suggest not targeting an individual editor because again I respect the other editors very much, and part of the reason we don't have to confer very much is, again, we appreciate each other's differentness, but also, I love the stuff the other editors pick.

And like, there are several poets that it'll be like, oh, I just accepted a poem by this person. And the other person will be like, me too. And the other person will be like, I did also. So yeah, we do very frequently, yes, we do all like that poet. And if I see that somebody is submitting to us that has been accepted by another of the editors, I will give their work a closer look, because that's already a recommendation.

Kat Kourbeti: And would you say that that extends to editors before you joined the team, or you know from before?

Romie Stott: Yeah. Okay. Again, getting into the weeds of the way the submission software works. In Moksha, the submissions portal, we can see the submissions history of anybody who's submitting to us, and there is a little A that shows up next to their name if we've ever accepted them. That includes if they've been accepted by fiction. Like I can just see if Strange Horizons has published this person before. So it is impossible to avoid. Like we can all see it all the time. We always know, 'cause they have the A.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay. So yeah, so that does give you a little bit of a stamp of, somebody has trusted this person before, like their work. So that's cool. Thank you so much for that very cool list. We'll post the links to everything so people can go check that out.

Now back to fiction, 'cause I'm sure that the fiction editors here have more stuff to recommend, so please keep them coming. What's another one? You have another one that you would like to recommend, Kat?

Kat Weaver: Yeah. So I want to give a shout out to a story, one of the other editors who isn't here, Dante Luiz, he worked on a story called Nuca by Ana Hurtado. And that one is a fascinatingly written story, the poetry of it is incredible. In fact, it's not that the poetry of it obscures what's going on, it more creates a tone poem of what is happening in the story. It is about a group of young women who go to a waterfall. And this group of young women has faces on the backs of their necks. And it's a lovely story. It's a fascinating story. There's all sorts of like interpersonal relationships between young women that are like breaking apart and like coming together. It's such an interesting piece, and like the metaphor of the faces on the backs of their necks does so much. So I wanted to give that shout out to that story of Dante's.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you. It's really cool actually, side note, that Dante has moved between departments kinda laterally from art to fiction and so on. Yeah, very nice. And I love him as an artist and as a writer. So it's just great. I love everybody in this magazine. I was gonna make a Mean Girls reference, but it's not appropriate. So yeah. Thank you for that.

Hebe, do you have any other stories you'd like to recommend?

Hebe Stanton: Yeah, I wanted to talk about one, which actually Kat mentioned earlier, one of our novelettes, The Aquarium for Lost Souls. This is about a woman who ends up dying repeatedly on a space station. And the space station is also an aquarium. And fairly early on the story, we discovered that the aquarium actually holds the remnants of the Pacific Ocean. So yeah, Romie was talking earlier about climate grief, and this is one that really evoked that for me, which is something that I'm thinking about a lot at the moment for reasons. And so yeah, it has that influence and it manages to resonate this very large grief, grief that not one person can hold, with a small tragedy that's happening to this woman who has crashed in this aquarium. And that thematic resonance managing to connect these smaller griefs with these larger griefs is one of those things that I think speculative fiction does really well, connecting the large with the personal, and I really love this story because I really like stories that attempt to represent otherness through formal innovation.

And I think this story does it really well. The voice of the Pacific Ocean is punctuated in very non-standard ways, which gives her prose sort of the rhythm of the tides, the pulling and pushing of the tides. I think that just does such a great job of evoking this, this being that isn't human, that is bigger than human, and really bringing home to that sense of loss as well, of her loss and all of our losses as well. So yeah, that's one of my favorites in this year.

Kat Kourbeti: That sounds beautiful. It reminds me of an older story that we published a few years back that I narrated, Bathymetry by Lorraine Wilson, that also kind of had themes of climate grief, and I think it was written around the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and that combined with a personal tragedy.

I love these stories in Strange Horizons because we always tend to resonate as a magazine collectively, I think, with stories that have that personal touch, where a character is going through something on their own, but then how do you reach into the world with the speculative themes and stuff.

So that one's one of the novelettes that we published last year, so that's awesome.

Kat Weaver: I just want to give a shout out again to some stories that another fellow editor who couldn't be here. So Aigner wanted to recommend Exit Interview by KW Onley, that was published in December. She also wanted to recommend Those Who Smuggle Themselves Into Slivermoon, that's by Varsha Dinesh, that was published in May, and she wanted to recommend Frogskin, written by ML Krishnan, and that was in January.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, the bit of variety there from different themes, and also different times in the calendar. Remember that everything is eligible from January of last year. Are those stories that Aigner edited herself?

Kat Weaver: Those I believe are stories that Aigner worked on.

Kat Kourbeti: Cool, cool. At some point we will have her on this podcast, so help me. Just calendars and timing, but we will make that work.

My little—not selfish 'cause I didn't work on this like at all—but my country-person, Avra Margariti, had a story with us last year called Cicadas, and their Skins. Who edited that one?

Hebe Stanton: That was Aigner, I think.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I love that story. Mostly because it's Avra's weirdness which, they're known for just being a little weird goblin. Loads of folk horror among my country people. I'm from Greece originally, if the listeners don't remember that, and I just love reading stories that even if they're not set within a Greek setting, they feel Greek. And Avra has a tendency towards some dark things lurking under the surface. So if that's your vibe, check out Cicadas and Their Skins. That's my recommendation here.

Anybody else have anything? I don't wanna hog the microphone, 'cause this is your time to talk about your work. So I'm happy to defer.

Romie Stott: Has anybody already mentioned my favorite story from last year, The Jaxicans' Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37, by Steven Granade?

Kat Weaver: That's one Hebe worked on.

Romie Stott: I loved that. That's my favorite. It's from back in April and I've reread it many times.

Hebe Stanton: I really like IKEA stories basically. I think there's something very uncanny about an Ikea and I really like stories that kind of use that for effect. That was a very fun story to work on, I think. It's both irreverent and also comes to some really quite touching truths about authenticity. And just generally how do you go on in this ridiculous situation, which is these humans have been resurrected in the far, far future to be studied by aliens who want to learn about basically chains, chain stores. So the protagonist was an employee at a taco restaurant. And he's been reincarnated to go through his life as a Taco Tuesday employee and it's very funny, but it's also very profound I think. Like, what is authenticity anyway, 'cause the aliens are trying to reconstruct authenticity and the protagonist is like, but this is a chain restaurant. Like it's not really authentic, but then it is as well, because it's also about reconstructing a feeling, not necessarily the kind of specific food, the feeling of being in these restaurants and the experiences that you can have in them, even as the food is bad. So yeah, that was a fun one.

Kat Weaver: And that also is another story about a protagonist dealing with having their own personal revelation while at the same time confronting the more science fictional aspects, like the speculative world of their story, in which he is trapped in Taco Tuesday.

Kat Kourbeti: Is Taco Tuesday a real place? Asking as a European.

Kat Weaver: No.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Kat Weaver: I assume it is probably a Next Beef or something like Taco Bell.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like I learn something new every day. As a European, sometimes I'm just like confronted with the strangeness of the North Americas. So that's fair enough.

I think we wanted to shout out CL Hellisen's Godskin as well. It's on my list anyway. So we can quickly talk about that one. Do you remember who edited that one?

Hebe Stanton: That was me. Yeah. What I really liked about that was the bleakness, the absolute bleakness of the life that the protagonist lives, also how there's some hope and maybe it's just outta reach or maybe it's not reachable for you, but it's there and I think that seems to ring quite closely with a lot of the kind of folktale fairytale stuff. I think there often is this sense of life might be bleak, but you know, there's something there. I don't know, it rung some of my sort of spiritual, religious sort of bells, yeah. That was another lovely one to work on.

Romie Stott: I did wanna also shout out The Battle Verses of Prufrock J. Alfred by Rachel Rodman. And that was an acceptance by Lisa. Actually, several of the poems that I've mentioned were not accepted by me. I haven't been great about crediting the editors. Again, I have a head cold, but, we are all doing excellent work, like major praise to the other poetry editors. They are heroically good.

But The Battle Verses of Prufrock J. Alfred would probably be a weird pick for a Hugo nomination, I don't know. Because it's one of the less explicitly science fiction fantasy poems that we've run. We have sailors and mermaidy sirens and resurrections and all this kind of stuff, but it's essentially because there's a long history of poems about sea monsters and fantastical elements that have then fit into a literary tradition. A lot of times we are in conversation with preexisting works that have not necessarily been considered speculative fiction and saying well, they are though. And this is an example of that and also arguing with it.

So it's doing something in the same tradition of what like Grendel is doing with Beowulf or there's that wonderful novel that is about the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre and telling the story from her perspective.

Kat Kourbeti: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Romie Stott: Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Romie Stott: Yeah, so this poem is doing that with Prufrock, and it actually did get a fair amount of traction in terms of people talking about it, because it's exciting. It's a really good piece. It's worth checking out.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you. Yes, I do love response kind of writing, because especially in science fiction and fantasy, I think we tend to place a lot of classics on a pedestal like, you know, it's up there and we can't touch it. And so works that tend to engage and respond to that kind of work is, I think it's interesting. I think we all have thoughts about those pieces and I think it's worth exploring them.

Romie Stott: Yeah. I'd say in general, our department publishes a lot of work that's in conversation with other preexisting work. Just partially because that's the fabric of poetry. It's very allusive.

Kat Kourbeti: Lovely. So thank you so much for taking the time for just going through some of the stuff that we published last year. By no means an exhaustive list because as readers and listeners will know, there's at least a short story most weeks, some weeks are special issues, and so we have more of those. We publish multiple poems constantly, and in the special issues also.

And I know that we talked about short stories and novelettes and poetry today, but there's also a lot of nonfiction content within Strange Horizons that is super worth looking at. We have ongoing columns, we have articles and reviews from one time contributors. Loads of really great stuff that deserve attention and time. So I hope that people will look at all of that.

We'll put links to everything and to where we can find you on social media for if and when people would like to chat to you. And yeah. Thank you very much.

Kat Weaver: Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Hebe Stanton: Thank you.

Romie Stott: Thank you. I mean, Because of our wild geographic diversity as a magazine, we don't have many opportunities to get together, so it's a pleasure to hear your voices.

Kat Kourbeti: I know!