Bewildering Stories News

Lists

Just in case you haven’t noticed, three pages have been updated: Links, Submissions and Biographies & Bibliographies. Contributors please remember to keep me up to date on your bibliographies. All we need are the titles and issue numbers of anything that may be missing in your bibliography.

As “In Times to Come” says, our Second Anniversary Retrospectives, which began in issue 104, can be handy indexes. New readers can use them as guides to authors they’ve discovered they like. And, of course, they can always refer to their favorite authors’ Bewildering bibliographies.

Veteran readers may wonder why some titles don’t appear in the Retrospectives. Well, the lists are selective, although not too rigorously so. We wanted lists long enough to be useful but not so long that they simply repeated everything.

What about a “short list” of top favorites from the second year? After all, Jerry has long been enthusiastic about an anthology or three in some form. And anthologies require almost ruthless selection, don’t they? Okay, I’ve made up a list of my own and sent it to him. After all, we had to start somewhere; it isn’t very practical to say, “We’ll exchange lists... synchronize watches... now !” But we won’t publish any Editors’ Choices unless we’re both convinced it’s a good idea and we have two sets.

And if we don’t get around to making any official Choices, that’s okay, too. Our first priority is to bring you Bewildering Stories regularly and readably; that’s our idea of a good time. Acting as a jury parsimoniously distributing virtual prizes ranks near the bottom on our list of fun things to do. Rather, you, the readers, can make your own lists of the “top however many.” Your lists may well be much more satisfying than anyone else’s, and they’re something that can be discussed happily in our forum.