How important are the small press magazines in terms of bringing fresh voices to the front?
Very. Robert Heinlein used to claim that he sold his first story right off the bat and never looked back, but information has come out recently to show that’s not the case. Every writer needs to learn the craft and there has to be a place for that learning to occur. Dan Keyes says he learned in the pulps in the 1950s. Nowadays the pulp market is gone, but the small press remains strong. I think Bill Gibson’s first story appeared in a small-press magazine called Unearth. What are some of the most thought-provoking themes in contemporary SF and Fantasy fiction? Have these changed much in the last twenty years? I’m in the process of assembling an anthology of stories from F&SF about Mars and I noticed a big change in sf between 1964 and 1975. It occurred to me that the only change in SF/fantasy in the past twenty-five years that’s as big has been the electronic revolution and the advent of cyberspace. Otherwise, I think most of the stories published nowadays could have been published in 1
