mojoe

I see this pattern a lot -- folks start a publication, publish for a handful of years, and then shutter. I did it myself with Compelling Science Fiction magazine. This is why I settled on releasing only one book per year, it's sustainable while working full-time on other projects.

My reading is that OpenAI is paying lip service. Altman is basically saying "OF COURSE we don't want to spy on Americans or murderdrone randos, but OF COURSE the government would never do that, they just told me so (except for the fact that they just cut ties with Anthropic because Anthropic wouldn't let them do that)"

nicely said. I've been thinking a lot about how the bottleneck in the limit is getting your intent into the machine. Over time as AI improves it'll get better and better at extracting your intent just from situational context, but this only helps if you're willing to abdicate more and more judgement to the machine.

Eventually you may get to the point where the machine has all the context about the scenario and all the knowledge about how you think, and so will always perfectly be aligned with your intent, but when that day comes the thing will have far surpassed your decision-making capability and you won't be in the loop anymore anyway.

I love the slash for style menu, really nicely implemented!

And in 1925 they didn't even have the Internet

Really nice, reducing friction when note-taking is super valuable.

I was using my garage as a warehouse for the books, and it burned down, so I lost all the remaining copies of that first printing, unfortunately!

Many authors can do a short story per week, I would definitely get out of bed for $30k/week

That's really cool! Yes, it's always been amazing to me how many people will respond helpfully to a random cold email.

And well-known authors are similar to other artists in the fact that they have steep rates for commissions. For instance, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com pays a flat reasonable rate of 14 cents per word ($840 for a 6k word story). I've talked to well-known authors who would charge $5/word for that same story on commission ($30k)

My favorite collection recently was "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". It spans his short fiction from 1965-2001.

I've considered commissions many times, I go back and forth on it. I wouldn't want to put a commissioned story into a "Year's Best" anthology, just because I truly want it to be a "Year's Best" -- i.e. I need to evaluate ALL the stories published to the best of my ability and choose the best regardless of name recognition.

I could commission some and create a new themed book separate from the "Year's Best", but that's hit and miss. The main issue with commissions for me is that you never really know if the thing you're commissioning is going to turn out how you want. If the authors are well-known it will probably be good, but I've had many editor friends commission stuff that was just phoned in.

Yes, I plan on releasing one annually, based on the best concept-driven science fiction stories from the previous year. Any more than that and it would take too much time, but one per year is sustainable for me.

I agree that there are many forgotten gems in old science fiction short stories. I just counted on my bookshelf, I own 19 of those old collections in physical form and I'm sure many more in ebook form.

Makes sense!

The entire section under "original short stories" is how the website used to look back when it was a science fiction magazine.

Thanks for pointing that out, I need to remove that submissions page altogether, the magazine has been shut down for five years and you found your way to a vestigial part of the site that almost nobody visits anymore.

I wrote a post about the ralan closure in 2023: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/ralan.com-closes-...

If you're looking for places to submit, https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ is now the place I recommend to check.

A picture of the first page of the TOC is the only one I have immediately available: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/images/toc.jpg

I'm sure an excel pro would find excel much easier, I just like writing Python more than excel macros!

First I just want to say that it's an honor that you took a look, I've read and enjoyed many of your articles in the past.

This anthology is actually a "Year's Best" -- they're reprints selected from a pool of 391 stories printed in the big science fiction magazines last year. So I'm not opening for submissions, or anything like that (I have done that before, back when I published a magazine). For this anthology I reached out to the authors about the best concept-driven stories I read last year, and fortunately they all agreed to let me publish their stories.

Happy to talk about it, the TL;DR is that this is a hobby where I as the editor don't expect to make back the money I spent creating the book, but the authors get paid a fixed amount up-front. Here's a more detailed answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785154#45879003

The only addendum to that answer is that after being featured on HN last week I'm now over halfway toward break-even.

Thanks for your support! I believe I understand where you're coming from, some of the stories have more novel concepts than others -- Twenty-Four Hours is hard to discuss without spoilers, but I selected it because the characters and setting felt very real, while at the same time it would completely fall apart without the technological concept.

As I wrote in that blog you linked, I tried to interleave the stories so that you get alternating vibes as you go through the book. I know not every story will be for everyone, but I hope you find most of them interesting!

I plan on pursuing as close to the same process as I can next year, I want to put out the most consistently concept-focused Year's Best out there.

This looks cool, I'll check it out!

The reprint rights agreements were all extremely manual, I did everything through email and SignNow. Mostly payments went through PayPal, although there was one author who wanted a physical check mailed.

Thanks, you're completely correct, rights acquisition was the most difficult part!

The absolute hardest story in the anthology to get rights for was "Stars Don't Dream" by Chi Hui. It's a translation of a story that won an award in China, but Chi Hui doesn't speak English, and her contact info was extremely hard to obtain (I had to get help from the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine). We did the entire contract discussion via a combination of Google Translate and my very weak Mandarin I learned in college.

(I'm a huge Peter Watts fan, btw)

Thank you, I hope you enjoy it!

Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years).

Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop

All of the source references are in the section called "Permissions" at the end of the book, this is a common way that anthologies do references but I understand it is easy to miss!

I think your feeling is probably the most common one, which is why short science fiction readers are a vanishingly small percentage of the population. One of the reasons novels are much more popular than short fiction (orders of magnitude more popular) is because once you find a world you enjoy you can sit in it for a while. With short fiction as soon as you build up the world in your head it's done and you have to move on to the next one.

I like jumping from world to world more than the average person -- I'm happy getting that new, novel idea and then jumping to the next thing. I understand I'm atypical, but I think there's probably a higher percentage of people like me on HN than there are in the overall population.

Just confirming that yes, I chose the art. It's hard to please everyone with a project like this, I'm glad you like it!

Thank you for offering, but I don't have any channel for donations -- I'm grateful that my software work enables me do projects like this without worrying too much about the funding part.

I'm the editor, and I actually used LaTeX to typeset the book and wrote my own Python software to keep track of all the story metadata while I was evaluating stories over the course of the last year, I should write a post about that :)

I did not. It should be DRM-free on Amazon as well!

Thank you for posting a link to Neil's magazine! I think he's the best short-form editor working in SFF today.

Thanks!

I pay a fixed rate up-front for reprint rights, which is a one-time deal. This is mostly because pro rata royalties on an anthology are a pain (I've done this before, it involves sending out lots of tiny single-digit-dollar checks), but also because it's unlikely for me to make back the money I spend on anthology creation (science fiction short stories are a tiny market).

This is a hobby project for me, I'm obsessed with trying to get more people to read science fiction short stories. I spent about $6k creating the anthology (to pay for cover art, reprint rights, proof prints, etc), and I'll probably recoup about half of what I spent? We'll see, I'm currently testing various marketing strategies.