Some readers have been asking me how I selected the stories in Think Weirder, so here are a few words about my process.

Story curation can seem fairly straightforward to those not engaged in the activity. You read a bunch of stories, and pick the good ones! It’s not complicated.

But the number of ways to evaluate a story is shockingly large. There are some standard ways: theme, plot and structure, characterization, writing quality, technical elements, style, dialogue, overall impact. But when you’re doing a genre anthology, the number of axes grows. The theme of Think Weirder is “concept-driven, near-future ideas”. But what counts as a near future story? How near is near enough? How do you balance amazing character arcs against technological concepts? How plausible is plausible enough? The list goes on.

My process is a multi-stage one that goes like this:

• First pass, I read or skim all the stories from all the major magazines and some of the smaller ones, along with a few standalone first-published anthologies. The process actually starts the year before, when I read some of the stories as they are released. The ones I miss I collect and read in the new year. This is where I filter for genre. I only retain the concept-driven, relatively near-future science fiction stories. Fantasy is really easy to filter, and then I have to drill down further to separate out the different kinds of science fiction. The way I track story candidates over time is with a little Python script I wrote called se.py (Story Evaluator), that I invoke to store metadata about the stories I want to evaluate further. This first pass is very loose, and mostly just excludes anything that isn’t moderately plausible science fiction.
• Once I have the smaller list of stories that might fit, I evaluate each story in more detail. First, I exclude stories that are not concept-driven. This means that stories that are exclusively character-driven, relationship-driven, atmosphere-driven, plot-driven, etc. are excluded. This doesn’t mean that the stories can’t contain those elements — they can and should. It just means that, for instance, a story exclusively about a relationship between two people with some light science fictional setting is not a good candidate. The story has to ask one or more interesting “what if?” questions to be included in the final list.
• The final decision stage is the trickiest for me, because it involves the most subjective evaluation. Once I have filtered for concept-driven stories, I’ll exclude the ones that are a little too far-future or implausible, but this is negotiable! I also have to watch total word count — the book can only be so big, and I aim in the region of 100k-150k total words across all selections. This stage is also where I’m evaluating on style, structure, plot, characterization, dialogue, and world-building. If a story has a really strong style and concept, for instance, I might be more forgiving on implausibility or timeline. This is how Isabel J. Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole made the final cut for Think Weirder Volume 1. The story is so concept-dense and stylistically unique that it was one of my favorites of the year (and considering that it won the Nebula, Locus, and BSFA awards for best short story, many others felt the same way).

Once I have the final list of stories, I contact the authors, send contracts, and pay them. I was concerned at this stage that one or more of the authors I’d selected wouldn’t want to be part of the anthology for whatever reason, but I was lucky and nobody rejected my offers to buy reprint rights for Think Weirder.

After the rights are purchased there is one more step in the curation process: ordering the stories in the table of contents. This is almost entirely vibes for me, but I try and alternate the “feel” of stories. For instance, Greg Egan’s Death and the Gorgon is a very grounded, near-future mystery, so I put Grant Collier’s The Best Version of Yourself directly after it, since The Best Version of Yourself is a much more extrapolative story (and frankly has a wilder vibe about people undergoing a transformation that leaves them hard to recognize as human). And the vibe ordering can be about totally different categories, too — Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling by David W. Goodman feels like a smart, polished successor to golden age space opera, so I put a much nearer-future story directly after it (Nine Billion Turing Tests by Chris Willrich). I could go on and explain the entire ordering of the book, but you get the idea. Interleaving vibes!

That’s the whole process from start to finish. If you are like me, and you enjoy a specific type of concept-rich story that you’ll think about long after you finish reading, I think you’ll like the anthology. I’m looking forward to doing it all over again next year, but I’m happy to have a break first. Since I do all of this at night after my kids go to sleep, it basically becomes my only hobby in the months leading up to release.

I’m going to leave you with a request: please review the book on Amazon if you liked it! Thank you for supporting the weird stuff you want to see more of in the world.

Joe