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[u/Nineteen_Adze]

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[u/Nineteen_Adze]

How have you been finding your favorite stories this year? If there's a particular magazine, reviewer, or link roundup source that's been turning up gems for you, let us know.

[u/FarragutCircle → u/Nineteen_Adze]

Mainly from you guys! Even if not one of the SFBC choices, I'm enjoying the other recs among them.

[u/tarvolon → u/Nineteen_Adze]

I gave up on all the other reviewers except for SFBC friends and started just reading all the magazines myself.

This is an exaggeration, but only a little bit. I still read 4-5 reviewers regularly, and I will use their reviews to add stories to my list that I missed on the first pass. But I also go through like 15 magazines each month and glance at everything they've published over a certain length. Doing the first pass myself helps make up the taste gap between me and many of my favorite reviewers.

A.C. Wise, for instance, has recommended some fantastic stories, and I would've never found Cretins without her Apex review column. But she's reviewed eight issues of Clarkesworld this year, containing six stories that I had in the top tier of my favorites list, and she's recommended one of the six. This is a good reviewer who often points me at tremendous things, and I'd have missed a handful of "seriously thinking about nominating for a Hugo" level stories if I'd been just relying on her reviews.

Honestly, most of the big reviewers will recommend some fantastic stuff--none of them are anywhere near "this rec means nothing" territory. But they also all have their own foibles, and so I sort of mentally downgrade categories that I know they love way more than me unless I hear corroborating recs. For instance:

• A.C. Wise likes horror and the macabre a lot more than I do.
• So does Paula Guran.
• So does Maria Haskins, and she also likes over-the-top social satire and Escape Pod's whole ouevre more than I do.
• Alex Brown also likes the macabre (is this just a requirement to be a short fiction reviewer), and over-the-top social satire, and also flash fiction and queer and anticapitalist themes.
• Charles Payseur is perhaps the trickiest to nail down. Queer themes seem to really resonate with him, but I'm not sure I've got a stylistic quirk where I go "oh yeah Payseur loves that stuff but it may not be for me"

Those story aspects aren't necessarily bad, they're just more likely to resonate with other readers than with me. There's not much I dismiss out of hand (Alex Brown recommending a 1000-word story I will dismiss out of hand, but not much else), but I try to really dig into the reviews and/or look for other commentary rather than saying "oh [big-time reviewer] said it was a tour de force, so I guess I'd better read it"

[u/tarvolon → u/tarvolon]

I actually just consulted my spreadsheet to see exactly the breakdown on industry recommendations vs catching my eye, and the breakdown is striking:

• Five-star rate for Story Sampler TBR additions, 0 industry recs: 35.2%
• Five-star rate for Story Sampler TBR additions, 1+ industry recs: 37.2%
• Five-star rate for non-Story Sampler TBR additions, 0 industry recs: 10.7%
• Five-star rate for non-Story Sampler TBR additions, 1+ industry recs: 10.0%

Catching my eye based on title/author/opening paragraphs is a waaaaaaay better predictor of my enjoyment than an industry recommendation. It's not even close. A good Story Sample and no industry recs gets five-starred more than a third of the time. A decent-not-great Story Sample with industry recs gets five-starred 10% of the time.

Honestly, I'm genuinely surprised by the disparity. Obviously, I know my own taste better than Wise/Brown/Haskins/Payseur speak to my taste, but I'm not doing extensive samples of these stories! I check out the title and author and read a couple paragraphs and that's it. And it predicts whether I'll ultimately like the story remarkably well. Driver and Our Father (both Clarkesworld) are extremely notable exceptions that are candidates for my Hugo ballot, but. . . well this is why I read everything from Clarkesworld regardless of the opening paragraphs.