Ancient Logic

Neil Clarke’s post on Clarkesworld explaining why his magazine doesn’t have a short fiction review column struck me. Not having access to his web traffic logs I can’t argue with the facts he brings to bear, namely that short fiction reviews don’t drive readers to the site. I would say on a pure anecdotal level, however, that I have read many short stories on the basis of review columns and, more importantly, also discovered markets where such stories appear. These “What I Read” posts also tend to attract the most traffic on my site. That said, I agree with him on one level - this blog, which really is just a list of the stories I like - is probably not going to be moving anyone to read a particular story. I do hope that in assembling these lists every month a casual short story reader might come across a title that does seem worth interesting or a magazine that they had not heard of. Really, if the year so far has taught me anything, it’s that there is an incredible wealth of qu...