Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
"Thoughtcrime Experiments", Four Years On
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2013 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Four years ago today, Leonard and I released Thoughtcrime Experiments, an anthology of original speculative fiction and art. It's still an enjoyable collection to read, so check it out. The authors and artists continue to publish and thrive, and I get to call them mine, but not in a creepy way! With Ken Liu especially it's thrilling that I got to play a part in the restarting of a career that's so spectacularly taken off. And how it delights me that Mary Anne Mohanraj has written a collection in the world of "Jump Space"!
I still stand by my conclusion from a few months after the initial release: to me, turning nonreaders into occasional sci-fi readers, and occasional readers into rabid readers, is a more interesting unsolved problem than curating and editing unpublished art and turning it into published art. I applaud K. Tempest Bradford's regular short fiction recommendations, for instance. But I'm superglad for the editors who love editing! Yay for writers, readers, editors, and marketers! And I understand making stuff better because I did it. You can do it too.