It took me a long time to get through Crowley’s book, and I’ve got one more novel to review for the World Fantasy Awards. While I’m working on it, here is some commentary on the Locus Reading List that is one of the major feeders into the SFF awards.

For the last couple or three years Natalie Luhrs has done an analysis of the Locus Reading List, checking the gender and race breakdown. Here’s her analysis for 2017, and here’s the one for 2018. In the 2018 conclusions section, she’s noted that the list is important because the effects go way beyond just recommendations on what people should read. It’s also about how readers draw from lists like this or sites like Rocket Stack Rank, for example, to make their nominations for the awards.

Luhrs’ results for 2017 shows a slant toward male writers and a tendency to repeat the same person-of-color (POC) writers across categories and years. The analysis for 2018 shows the list achieved closer gender parity as a whole and slightly expanded non-binary writers, but actually fewer POC were included than in 2017. On the positive side, in 2018 Luhrs found a few additions to the list of favored POC.

Luhrs then went on to complain that “We don’t have nearly enough women or POC editing anthologies.” I’m suspecting this could be a mistaken assumption. Locus listed only three, but if you check, there are a bunch of female and POC editors out there trying to do it. The problem is that the Locus List hasn’t recognized the women and POC who are editing anthologies.

So what does this mean? Is the perception that women and POC can’t edit good quality anthologies? Are their anthologies actually substandard? Do these editors/publishers struggle to get professional quality submissions because they’re not considered competent? Do they struggle to get professional level review?

I’ve had the conversation with Greg Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank about how “quality” is defined in the SFF community. This boils down to accepting that the most successful magazines, publishers and editors get the best works, and you can make a list of the “best” by reading just these magazines and looking at the releases of these publishers or these few recognized editors. This system further promotes the sources, of course, which means they become more successful and continue to shut out minority editors struggling to be found in the small press. That’s why the same people appear on the Locus Reading List every year. The system is self-perpetrating.

If we really want to achieve something more than tokenism, shouldn’t we look for another avenue for editors to make it into this system?

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