Anatomy of an Anthology-3

This weekend I need to cut my list of twenty stories down to fourteen for The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories. This will allow me to start contacting authors next week about acquiring reprint rights to their stories. This is all done fairly quickly these days by e-mail, text, Facebook, and Twitter. When I first started doing this, way back when, it took much longer as it was all done by snail mail. As such I have wonderful letters from many authors. One of the most memorable letters was from Ursula K. Le Guin. Infinivox published “The Shobies’ Story,”—part of her Hainish series—as part of its Great Science Fiction Stories audiobook series. This was way back when audiobooks were published on cassette tapes. Among other things, she gave me a very detailed pronunciation guide to use for her story. She was very gracious and open to my attempts to get the series up and running even though I was new to the field. To be honest, most authors, now and back then, are also gracious and go out of their way to be helpful. The science fiction field is fortunate to have so many wonderful people in it. It’s a pleasure to work with most authors!