Happy birthday to us!

Exactly one year ago, we launched SFFReviews — happy birthday to us!!

In the last year, our team of reviewers has reviewed around 480 pieces. Most are pieces of fiction–speculative, fantasy, horror, sci fi, romance, queer–ranging from flash fic all the way up to novellas, but we’ve also reviewed poetry and nonfiction in the context of some of the anthologies we’ve reviewed.

We’ve reviewed stories by award-winning authors, stories that have been selected for their year’s “Best Of” anthologies, stories by authors for whom this is their first publication. We’ve reviewed stories in pro venues, in semi-pro venues, and in emerging venues that hope to one day reach those levels. We’ve reviewed stories published by mainstream publishers as well as ones that have been self-published or published by small presses. Want to read our most-read review? It’s of George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell’s anthology Abandoned Places. Want to read a review that was missed by most of our readers when it was first published>? Then read our review of Henry Stanton’s “Mother Imago”.

Throughout, we’ve worked hard to emphasise the personal and subjective nature of the experience of reading a story: We don’t try to be objective in our reviews, we don’t provide ratings or stars or statements of comparative quality, because there is no way to separate a story from the person reading it, and so every individual’s experience of a story is going to be just that — individual. We’ve tried to be sensitive to when the content of the stories or our reviews may be distressing to certain readers, and to treat all the authors we’re reviewing with respect and kindness, even when we think the story fell short of our own personal hopes for it.

A site like this wouldn’t exist without a huge number of people contributing to it. Thank you to Charles Payseur for giving us the idea in the first place. Thank you to all of our dedicated reviewers, past and present, whether they were able to review many stories or only a few. (Want to join us?) Thank you to everyone who has followed us on Twitter or Facebook, who has read, liked, linked to, tweeted, and shared our reviews.

But most of all, thank you to all the writers who have written these stories. Without you, we wouldn’t have anything to review. You make the world better through the stories you write; all we do is try to boost the signal a bit.