Season's Greetings from Strange Horizons

As 2021 winds down, we want to offer you our warmest thanks for your support this year. Some of you have joined this Patreon within the last few days; others of you have been funding our work for a very long time indeed. It makes a huge difference.

In 2022, you can look forward to not only our usual weekly issues, but double the poetry in regular issues, and fully six special issues (one of which is a mega-sized Samovar). We hope to start adding more flash fiction in addition to the short stories we already publish; we don’t have a start date for that yet, but it’s in the works. Here’s some of what you can anticipate:

31 January 2022: Reviews and Criticism Special

30 May 2022: SFF Art Special

29 August 2022: Southeast Asian SFF Special

26 September 2022: Extractivism in SFF Special

31 October 2022: Music Special

In keeping with our promise to give you behind the scenes access, here’s a link to our Google Calendar. If you ever want to check when a special issue is coming up, or an issue of Samovar, or the next installment of your favorite column, this is a place to look.

As for what you can expect on Patreon specifically, we’ll resume our usual weekly updates in January, each time we release a new issue. We know we’ve been quiet for the last six months, and the fact that you’ve continued to trust us is something we don’t take for granted. As many or most of you know, we had a very sudden leadership transition earlier this year; several of our core personnel had to step away (or step back) due to illness and caretaking responsibilities. Someone’s house burned down. Several people had computers fail (and then had to wade through microchip shortages).

We also brought on or elevated new volunteers, including new fiction editors Aigner Loren Wilson, Hebe Stanton, Kat Weaver, and Vanessa Aguirre, new poetry editor Sydney Hilton, new articles editors Emma Celi and Juliana Pinho, and new copyeditor Alyssa Wejebe. You’ve been enjoying their work already; many of the most exciting stories, poems, and essays you’ve read this year have been pieces they’ve championed.

As we’ve waded through the chaos (some of it good!) and found new working methods, there have been times when, collectively, we have been faced with insufficient spoons, even when all of us have pulled together - or in some cases have needed to figure out how to transfer software licenses. During those times, we’ve prioritized putting out issues of the magazine. We figure that’s ultimately the reason you’re supporting us. It’s also, conveniently, our area of expertise.

We haven’t forgotten you, though.

We think we’ve finally gotten the ebook creation process straightened out. So in January (fingers crossed) we will hopefully send those of you who support us at $4/month or move a dropbox link where you can download all the 2021 ebooks we owe you. In 2022, in theory, we’ll be back to our once-a-month ebooks.

For those of you who have been supporting us at the $6/month or more tier for more than a year, we owe you some merch. We’ll be in touch soon to work out the details. (By soon, we probably mean January, and maybe February. It does not seem wise to try to ship a bunch of stuff during the holidays, in the thick of an Omicron surge.)

Here’s the part where we ask for your help, but in an exciting way. We’re planning to restructure some of our rewards tiers sometime in the next few months (although the $4 tier is likely to stay the same). If you have suggestions for higher-tier rewards you’re enthusiastic about - especially rewards we can deliver digitally - please drop us a line at management@strangehorizons.com, or reach out to Co-Ordinating editor Gautam Bhatia directly at gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com. Even if you’re pretty sure you’ve already told us your idea before, we are different people now (in a completely literal sense that due to staff turnover, different people are reading the mail that goes to the management email address).

Thank you for sticking with us. In all sincerity, we love you very much.

Sincerely,

Romie Stott

administrative editor, Strange Horizons