As Jed departs,
N.K. Jemisin says some awfully nice things about what we did at SH, which I am gleefully repeating most of here. :-)
"...I think it�s important to point out just how revolutionary SH has been � and no, I�m not heaping praise upon it because Jed & the gang have published two of my short stories, which gave me 2/3rds of the sales I needed to reach SFWA pro status. I�m heaping praise upon it because the folks who started that magazine have done a lot to change this genre for the better. At the time SH first started, SFF magazines were largely all print, hard to find on the newsstand shelves (you had to subscribe to be sure), and representative of many things wrong with the genre: women rarely appeared in their tables of contents, people of color rarely appeared in their pages, and too many of the stories published were thinly-veiled paeans to colonialism or white male power fantasy. SH just threw that whole model out and went back to the drawing board. They opted for broad accessibility rather than esoteric tradition. They embraced literary quality with the same fervor as speculative content, where other markets turned up their collective noses at genre meandering or stylistic shenanigans. And despite many, many naysayers at the time who predicted their early and ugly demise, they succeeded. They�ve been here all this time. They pay authors a pro rate even though they�re funded solely by donations. And they�re largely responsible for the rise of a new era of diversity within the genre, in content and composition and personnel � of whom Yours Truly is just one example."
Aw, shucks. :-)
