Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction
Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of Subterranean Press’ new anthology, Edited By. The book collects notable works of short fiction that have been, well, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most notable short fiction editors in the world of SF/F/H. It’s a beefy book full of stories by some incredible writers, including Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and many others. Part of what interests me about this book is the concept behind it and the way it highlights the weird imbalance of awareness about editors in publishing. It is comparatively easy to collect work edited by one short fiction editor than it is to do the same for novel editors. Short fiction editors also seem, in my opinion, much more visible, perhaps because they work with so many authors at a time (a benefit of the short format) than their novel-editing peers. This makes it rather easy for us to recognize the work editors do even if we don’t actually know what it is that they do.