As you may have seen in this week's editorial, we're preparing for some changes in the reviews department. Current Reviews Editor Abigail Nussbaum is stepping down at the end of the year, and she's in the process of handing over the reins to a new team. So far that team includes Maureen Kincaid Speller, Aishwarya Subramanian, and Dan Hartland (and we're looking for one more person to join them -- details here).
So it's also a good time to reach out to potential new contributors. We always like to see submissions from new reviewers, but from time to time it's worth putting out a dedicated call. So are you interested in writing reviews for Strange Horizons? Then read on!
You can see our pay rate ($30) and get a sense of the kind of reviews we're looking for by reading our guidelines; you may also want to read some published reviews. The short version is that we're looking for serious engagement with speculative work -- what does the work do? How does it do it? Why does that matter? -- by people who can write engagingly and creatively.
Beyond that, we don't have a house style. Our regular reviewers include readers, writers, academics, fans, and people who wear several of those hats all at once; and we have contributors who've been reviewing for decades, and contributors who've published their first reviews with us. What we want is to hear your voice and your perspective.
As with all our other departments, we're particularly interested in hearing from potential contributors whose perspectives are under-represented within the SF community. As our annual SF Count shows, there's still a lot of work to be done to improve representation in the critical discussion of SF, as well as in SF itself, and we want to help with that. So we'd love to hear from more women, reviewers of colour, queer reviewers, and international reviewers (among others!).
If you're interested, contact us at reviews@strangehorizons.com with the subject line "REVIEWER: [your name]". Tell us:
- What sorts of material you're interested in reviewing
- How often you'd be able to review
- A bit about yourself
Please also include some samples of your writing (or links to samples), and feel free to ask us any questions you might have. We'd love to hear from you.