In many ways, 2019 was a year of transition for me in SF/F. Early in the year, I announced that 2019 would be my last year on Uncanny Magazine‘s editorial staff, and much of the year was spent setting things in place for that change. I’m so pleased with how I was able to spend this last year on Uncanny and am excited to see what Elsa Sjunneson-Henry (Nonfiction Editor), Chimedum Ohaegbu (Managing Editor), and Angel Cruz (Assistant Editor) will do in Year 6 of the magazine.
Uncanny continues to be a project that I’m incredibly thankful to have been part of, so I’m pleased to share that Uncanny is once again eligible for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award. Uncanny had a fantastic Year Five, with phenomenal cover art and more gorgeous, passionate, experimental fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the special Disabled People Destroy Fantasy issue (#30), guest edited by Katharine Duckett (Fiction Editor), Nicolette Barischoff (Nonfiction Editor), and Lisa Bradley (Poetry Editor). I couldn’t have asked for a better year of incredible SF/F to end my time with the magazine.
I’m particularly proud of the nonfiction we published in 2019, which was my first year of holding the official title of Nonfiction Editor at Uncanny. As I was Nonfiction Editor for five out of six issues in 2019, this makes me eligible for consideration in the Best Editor (Short Form) Hugo Award category as well.
The original essays I edited for Uncanny in the 2019 issues 26, 27, 28, 29, and 31 include:
- “How to Make a Paper Crane” by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
- “What It Feels Like for a Fangirl in the Age of Late Capitalism” by Keidra Chaney
- “The Most Powerful Force” by Alec Nevala-Lee
- “Courage to the Sticking Place: Connecting SF/F Students With Creators” by Tracy Townsend
- “All in Good Fun: How Fanfiction Reignited My Passion for Writing” by Briana Lawrence
- “‘We Are What They Grow Beyond’: Star Wars and the Extended Universe” by Suzanne Walker
- “That Never Happened: Misplaced Skepticism and the Mechanisms of Suspension of Disbelief” by Marissa Lingen
- “Black Horror Rising” by Tananarive Due
- “Everyone’s World Is Ending All the Time: notes on becoming a climate resilience planner at the edge of the anthropocene” by Arkady Martine
- “Toy Stories” by Gwenda Bond
- “‘You Have Only Your Trust in Me’: Star Trek and the Power of Mutual Belief” by Nicasio Andres Reed
- “The Gang’s All Here: Writing Lessons from The Good Place“ by Tansy Rayner Roberts
- “The Better Place” by Karlyn Ruth Meyer
- “Was Trials of Mana Worth Growing Up For?” by Aidan Moher
- “Sir Elsa of Tortall, Knight of the Realm” by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
- “Beware the Lifeboat” by Marissa Lingen
- “If You’ve Heard This One Before” by Brandon O’Brien
- “The Science, Fiction, and Fantasy of Genre” by Alexandra Erin
- “The Page and the Panel: Writing Between Prose and Comics” by G. Willow Wilson
- “As You Know, Bob…” by Jeannette Ng
- “Confessions of an Adjacent Geek” by Keidra Chaney
This is a total of 21 original essays over the span of five issues, and I’m so very proud of them all. I should note that each of these essays is also eligible for the Best Related Work Hugo Award, and counts toward the authors’ eligibility for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award. Please give them a read, this is some stellar nonfiction writing by some amazing creators.
I’m admittedly disappointed in myself that I didn’t do much writing this year outside of editorials (although I did have my first piece of food writing published, which was my first piece of non-SF/F work in a very long time), but there’s no denying 2019 was a busy year! There’s always next year, but for now, I’m going to take my own advice and say that I’m very, very proud of what I was able to accomplish in 2019, I’m thrilled I did work that is eligible for the next Hugo Awards, and I deeply appreciate your consideration. Thank you.