Memphis writer new head of prestige Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine
A Memphis author has landed one of the most prestigious jobs in science fiction, fantasy and horror literature — and made history in the process.
Sheree Renée Thomas is the new editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, arguably the most respected fiction journal in the history of a genre that during the magazine's seven-decade run has emerged from the realms of pulp fiction and B movies to become a dominant force in popular culture.
Thomas is the first Black person or person of color to oversee the magazine, which boasts a legacy of authors that includes Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Joyce Carol Oates, Octavia E. Butler and Stephen King, to name a few.
"I'm still pinching myself," said Thomas, 48, a Downtown resident who is the author of dozens of stories, poems and essays, most of which qualify as science fiction or fantasy or tap into genre themes. (Her new collection of original fiction, "Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future," was published in May by Nashville-based Third Man Books, owned by musician Jack White.)
"My mind just flashes back to my childhood, really, here in Memphis," Thomas said. "My parents were big genre fans — horror fans, really — who helped me to have a love of fantasy at an early age."
Thomas said her first real exposure to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction occurred when she was in elementary school and she begged her mother, Jacqueline Thomas, to buy her the latest issue, from a newsstand in a grocery store. She said she couldn't remember if the image on the front was a spaceship, an alien landscape or an uncanny extraterrestrial, but "something on that cover called to me."
Thomas was recruited to edit "F&SF," as the magazine is known to readers, largely on the strength of two prose collections she edited: "Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora" (2000), and its sequel, "Dark Matter: Reading the Bones" (2004), each of which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology at the annual World Fantasy Convention.
The books include not only stories by such Black genre masters as Butler and Samuel R. Delany but rediscovered works by such seemingly unlikely contributors as pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and activist/author Amiri Baraka.
Thomas herself was ranked in similarly heady company when editors Ann and Jeff Vandermeer included her story, "The Grassdreaming Tree," in "The Big Book of Modern Fantasy," a new doorstop of an anthology that places the Memphis writer alongside George R.R. Martin, yes, but also Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Vladimir Nabokov.
Valedictorian at Sheffield High School, Thomas is a self-described "Air Force brat" whose family moved back-and-forth from its Memphis home, depending on her father's assignments.
She vividly remembers a childhood stint on a military base in White Sands, New Mexico, where "you're