Why I Am NOT Into Group Identity Based Anthologies
Modem's repaired, so I resume Fantastic Worlds after a long hiatus.
We start with
Why I Am NOT Into Group Identity Based Anthologies
From time to time, one sees an anthology containing stories by authors all belonging to some similar group -- they are women, black, Jewish, Russian, whatever. And some of the stories, and indeed whole anthologies, may indeed be quite good.
Nevertheless, when I see such an anthology, I start from the assumption that it is probably not as good, on average, as an anthology based on some other criterion (such as subgenre or year of publication). Why do I have such a prejudice -- and am I being irrational?
My reason is simple. The more criteria one applies to a selecting a story, other than its quality, the greater the limitation on the set of stories from which one is selecting. This in turn means that the average quality of the highest-quality stories in the set is likely to go down.
read the rest at http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-am-not-into-group-identity-based.html
We start with
Why I Am NOT Into Group Identity Based Anthologies
From time to time, one sees an anthology containing stories by authors all belonging to some similar group -- they are women, black, Jewish, Russian, whatever. And some of the stories, and indeed whole anthologies, may indeed be quite good.
Nevertheless, when I see such an anthology, I start from the assumption that it is probably not as good, on average, as an anthology based on some other criterion (such as subgenre or year of publication). Why do I have such a prejudice -- and am I being irrational?
My reason is simple. The more criteria one applies to a selecting a story, other than its quality, the greater the limitation on the set of stories from which one is selecting. This in turn means that the average quality of the highest-quality stories in the set is likely to go down.
read the rest at http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-am-not-into-group-identity-based.html