Once again, Rich Horton gives us a summary of Electric Velocipede from this year. Rich finds more time for reading than I could ever hope to, but I'm glad for it.
Rich started officially blogging not too long ago (he used to post mostly on sff.net which not everyone could get to) and has posted his annual summaries of short fiction magazines there. Rich says:
"[Electric Velocipede] remains one of the stronger small press 'zines."
I'd quote more, but these summaries are typically quite short, and I don't want to just take the whole thing and reproduce here when people can quickly go to the link I posted above and see the entire write up.
I do want to make one small point of clarification on the numbers/percentages that Rich puts at the end of his summary. Rich does not look at poetry, which makes my male-to-female ratio skew unfavorably. For the purposes of my numbers, if someone has more than one piece in the issue, I'm counting it as one.
- Issue #12: 11 contributors, 10 male, 1 female, 9% female
- Issue #13: 12 contributors, 7 male, 5 female, 41% female
- All of 2007: 23 contributors, 17 male, 6 female, 26% female
"[N]ext year the proportion should be higher still, as #14 will be an all-women issue."
A quick preview of next year:
- Issue #14: 15 contributors, 15 female, 100% female
- Issue #15: 15 contributors, 9 female, 60% female
- Issue #16: 14 contributors, 7 female, 50% female
- All of 2008: 44 contributors, 31 female, 70% female
3 comments:
Hi, John,
I know I'm not including poetry, but I really don't want to, because it's comparing apples and oranges to some extent. I am confident that women contribute a much higher proportion of SF poetry than they do of short fiction -- probably over 50%. The motivation for counting the stories by writer gender was mainly in reaction to a couple of controversies over the past couple of years -- posts at the Vector editorial blog about the proportion of stories by women in UK magazines, for example, and the famous slushbomb aimed at F&SF.
I certainly think you are choosing the best stories you have to hand -- and it's kind of meaningless to use very small samples (like seventeen stories) to make definitive points anyway. (That's partly why I mentioned 2006 and 2008.)
I was fairly confident that you weren't accidentally missing the poetry. You've never looked at it much. Heck, no one looks at it much, which is too bad.
Obviously for me, I include the poetry in my summing up for the zine. I haven't made a point of making a point of me gender ratios. I have the complete TOC of the zine online at my wiki, and people can go there and see for themselves.
As you say, with the small number of total stories (only publishing twice a year keeps those numbers down) it's probably not worth talking about trends.
One little note ... I do actually read the poetry, with interest. But I don't cover it for Locus, and I don't cover it in the end of year summaries.
I have, by the way, finally joined the SFPA.
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