I *am* getting things…

I *am* getting things done occasionally. Remember that Best of Strange Horizons book we were going to do, oh, back in November of 2001? I'm finally getting back to it, sending e-mails back and forth with Steve Berman of Lethe Press, making sure I have permission from the relevant authors, etc. If all goes well, we'll have copies available for sale by WorldCon.

Right now we're trying to determine pricing; Steve thinks that it should be something like $19.95 (it's a big book), and I think that's too much, and that we should be closer to $16.95. Any advice? Here's a copy of the TOC, if that helps you decide; it's mostly fiction, but there's some poetry, articles and reviews scattered through too. The book will be in trade paperback format, like the Year's Best anthologies.


  • Strange New Horizons, by Mary Anne Mohanraj
  • A Winter's Tale, by Nora M. Mulligan
  • Last Call in Temperance, by Alan DeNiro
  • Ghost Lakes, by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
  • Grief, by Wendy Rathbone
  • Explosions, by Michael J. Jasper
  • Medusa at Morning, by Beth Bernobich
  • A Gardener Betrayed by Roses, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
  • The Medieval Agricultural Year, by Rachel Hartman
  • Discovering the Earth in Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea, by Christopher Cobb
  • Sittin' a Spell at Miz Love's, by Nancy Proctor
  • Words of Love, Soft and Tender, by Mark Rudolph
  • The Heat of the Moon, by Gary Lehmann
  • Exogenous Origins of Life, by Dr. Max Bernstein
  • Frank Herbert's Dune: It can be filmed! A Review of the Sci Fi Channel Miniseries, by Fred Bush
  • Icarus, by Wendy A. Shaffer
  • In a Mirror, by Kim Fryer
  • One-Eyed Jack, by Connie Wilkins
  • Surreal Domestic, by Bruce Boston
  • Sophisticated Renaissance Fantasy: The Astrology, Necromancy, and Phytomancy of Melissa Scott's and Lisa Barnett's Point of Dreams, by Rob Gates
  • Major-League Entertainment: Moore and O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Bryan A. Hollerbach
  • A Private Unbinding of Time, by James Allison
  • The Palm Tree Bandit, by Nnedi Okorafor
  • The God of the Crossroads, by Tim Pratt
  • The Bridge Between Truth/Death and Power/Knowledge: Ted Chiang's "72 Letters", by Greg Beatty
  • Passing Through, by Kurt Newton
  • The Fen-Queen's Bride, by P. K. Graves
  • Something on the Bed, by D. K. Latta
  • accidental series, by Charles Coleman Finlay
  • Harrowing Urban Fantasy: Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and Other Stories, by John Aegard
  • Can a TV Tie-In Novel Achieve Excellence? Jeanne Cavelos' The Passing of the Techno-Mages, by R Michael Harman
  • Eliyahu ha-Navi, by Max Sparber
  • The Green Corn Dance, by Emily Gaskin
  • In the Shade of the Tree of Knowledge, by Michael Chant
  • Love Versus Corruption in a Psychological Space Opera: C. J. Merle's Of Honor and Treason, by Christopher Cobb
  • If the Dead Must Speak, by Ward Kelley
  • I Know Why Sales Clerks Fall From the Sky, by Mark Heath
  • Little Brother (TM), by Bruce Holland Rogers
  • Voodoo Corner Bus Stop, by Nancy Ellis Taylor
  • Alien or Human? Humanity's orphan children in Scott Mackay's The Meek, by Greg Beatty
  • Kubrick's A.I. and Square's Final Fantasy: Plastic for the People, by Danyel Fisher and R Michael Harman
  • A Tale of Collaboration, by Marge Simon and Bruce Boston
  • With Open Eyes, by Cecilia Tan
  • Interview: Pamela Dean, by Mary Anne Mohanraj
  • Interview: Gary A. Braunbeck, by Lucy A. Snyder
  • Late for Dinner, by Ursula Pflug
  • Toaster of the Gods, by Randall Coots

4 thoughts on “I *am* getting things…”

  1. That is indeed a massive amount of content for the book. I think $19.95 would be justified, but you’d sell more at the lower price, and that way people can’t complain about the cost for something that they could read online for free, if they wanted (provided the story/article/poem/editorial was still in the Strange Horizons archive).

    For the most part, this will be the first time a lot of these stories, poems, and non-fiction will see print, and that’s pretty nifty. Looking forward to it.

  2. The market will certainly bear a price of $19.95 for such a large anthology. Given the high per-unit cost of POD, lowering the price too much could eliminate any sort of profits.

  3. A few thoughts.

    1. $19.95 seems well justified, if anything a pretty good value esp with mass market paperbacks over $7 these days

    2. Beyond the text, will the anthology include some of the amazing art you have commissioned? And will it include any of the award nominated stories?

    I think both of the later points would help with the marketing and justification to buy – i.e. the illustrations will be better in print than on the web, and the presense of award nominated stories always is a bit of a draw.

    I, for one, am looking forward to seeing it!

  4. Mary Anne wrote: “The book will be in trade paperback format, like the Year’s Best anthologies.” Wanted to clarify that that refers to cover dimensions, not thickness; if we used the same font size as, say, Gardner’s Year’s Best, ours would come out to about 250 pages, or a little over a third the thickness of Gardner’s YBSF. Remember that a lot of the content here is short.

    Perhaps a better comparison in terms of size: if my numbers are right, this book would be about the size of a volume of Polyphony.

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