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
greeted by giant replicas of rockets. So I like to say I was imprinted by that experience of looking up and thinking about what we could do — the impossible being within our grasp."
Gordon Van Gelder, 54, owner and publisher of the Hoboken, New Jerseybased Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, said in a phone interview from his Jersey City home that he believes Thomas will "honor the traditions of the magazine but also try to move it in new directions, which is exactly what I want in an editor."
"She just seemed like a perfect fit, in terms of her talents and her interests and the history of the magazine," said Van Gelder, who made the job offer to Thomas in September.
Part of an active base of Black artists in Memphis with an interest in science fiction and "Afrofuturism," an esthetic that examines the intersections of Black culture and technology (see the "Black Panther" movie for a familiar example), Thomas said people of color always have been part of "an invisible bottom line" in science fiction (as depicted in the recent HBO series, "Lovecraft Country"). This was true even in the earlier years of science-fiction fandom, when white readers and creators "wouldn't necessarily see us at the convention or in line for a book signing."
She said "representation" in the genre goes beyond the identities assigned to the characters in stories, and imprints itself into the processes of making and experiencing art.
"As writers, editors and readers, we bring who we are to every page," she said, pointing out that one of the most familiar themes in science fiction — the "first contact" story, depicting the historic meeting of humans and aliens — has different resonance for different readers, and has been likened by cultural critics to representations of the first meetings of Europeans and Africans or Native Americans. "Reaching back to the transatlantic slave trade, being Black is like a 'first contact' story," she said.
Founded in 1949, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction remains one of the last digest-sized popular fiction magazines on newsstands that in decades past were crammed with hundreds of such journals. Other survivors include F&SF'S genre rivals, Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction, and the detective/crime periodicals, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
Published bimonthly and available online, each issue of F&SF now runs about 260 pages, with a newsstand cover price of $9.99. Circulation is about 20,000 copies per issue. Thomas will be the magazine's 10th editor, succeeding Charles Coleman Finlay, who was editor for six years. She's already working with Finlay to make the transition, and the first issue under her imprint will arrive in the spring.
Van Gelder said F&SF is able to turn a small profit while retaining high standards thanks to the efficiency and economy of its production: The magazine requires only a handful of people — mostly freelancers — to edit, copy-edit and design each issue. "We've remained a cottage industry, and I think that's been crucial to our survival," he said.
"We do have a lot of history with us," he said. "A lot of today's writers of any stripe know that we're the place that first published 'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes and 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter Miller, and writers certainly like being a part of that."
"Flower for Algernon" was the basis of the 1968 movie "Charly," which earned Cliff Robertson the Best Actor Academy Award. The magazine also introduced "Starship Troopers" by Robert Heinlein, which was adapted into a popular 1997 movie, and Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series.
If the magazine's staff is small, interest remains high, at least among budding authors: F&SF receives close to 20,000 story submissions per month, Van Gelder said. That explains why Thomas — who worked 20 years as a book editor for Random House in New York before she returned to Memphis in 2012 — will use a team of readers to help her narrow down the candidates for each issue, which she will edit from her Downtown home.
Thomas and Van Gelder first met in 1999, when he was one of her instructors at Clarion West, a famous workshop in Seattle for would-be sciencefiction writers. Another of Thomas' instructors was the late Octavia Butler, whose 1998 dystopian novel, "Parable of the Talents," prophetically imagined a near-future America threatened by a rabble-rousing presidential candidate who promises to "Make America great again."
Prophetic? Van Gelder said science fiction "eternally renews itself," and remains "a lens, to view life today, our past, and where we are going."
Indeed, as Thomas prepares for her new job, "We're literally in the middle of an international pandemic, which is one of the oldest clichés in the sciencefiction toolbox," she said.
"Ecological and environmental shifts, societal upheavals, accelerated global change — we are at a crossroads where people are reaching for other worlds and trying to find new ways of seeing. Science fiction and fantasy help us tap into unconscious needs and desires, and find new ways to problemsolve, and new ways to move forward."