In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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Lightspeed asks authors to determine whether a story is fantasy or science fiction. Do you have separate pools of slushers for these two categories?

I give every slush reader the option to either read both SF and Fantasy or just one or the other. The vast majority want to read both, but I can think of at least one reader who wanted to read only fantasy stories (someone I inherited from Fantasy Magazine). The only real separation of the slush teams is Lightspeed and Nightmare, though there’s a good amount of crossover between those.

Is it a problem if authors pick the ‘wrong’ category (I sometimes have stories that could arguably be either fantasy or sf)?

No, not a problem at all. It’s not even a problem if you submit it to the “wrong” magazine (i.e., Lightspeed instead of Nightmare). I instruct the slush readers to just evaluate the stories on their own merits, regardless of that kind of stuff. So they might make a note in their comments that the story didn’t really feel like SF but it’s definitely genre, and they liked it, so they say I should look at it and decide for myself.

Personally I don’t really care much about the genre distinctions, or even enforcing them rigidly…but Lightspeed‘s format is such that we have a number of slots (rather than a word count) to fill every month, so I do have to decide whether a story feels more like SF or feels more like fantasy for that purpose. And the thing is, some readers DO care about the distinction–some only like SF or really only like Fantasy, so I want to make the magazine as welcoming to them as possible as well, and thus I like the “slot” system since that means no issue will be 90% fantasy or something and thus disappoint the SF-only reader.

I’ve got one in inventory right now that the author submitted as SF but it felt like fantasy to me; however, it’s a trope that HAS been treated as SF in the past. I actually thought about taking this particular story for Nightmare too, so it was one of those that just could be called SF, fantasy, or horror (or maybe all three?). Stories like that are tricky to place. Ultimately, for that one, between SF and fantasy (eliminating horror from the equation since I bought it for Lightspeed), I’ll probably slot it in wherever I’ve got less inventory when it comes time to schedule the story.

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