It’s pretty hard to figure out what a sci-fi market is looking for when you read through their guidelines. You take a mag that publishes goony sword and sorcery and one that only publishes stories where orbital mechanics are the center of the plot, and both will ask for "well-crafted" or "character-driven" pieces. They can’t say they don’t want either, not if they want any sort of cred when they hang out in the secret editor club and swap stories about people we’ve rejected.
The other part of a guideline that’s not very informative is the pet-peeve section. Most markets have this, and I’m convinced that they represent common slushpile themes at the time the editors wrote up the guidelines. Strange Horizons takes the pet-peeve section and expands it into a full out vendetta.
As the SPACE SQUID slushpile reader I definitely come across recurring themes. It’s probably not fair to hold the author’s responsible for the pack they run with, after all, they have no idea what’s sharing the slushpile with them, but I thought I would share with you some plots that have popped up multiple times.
-Aliens abduct someone, usually a total redneck, and then there’s a twist. The twist usually involves either sodomy or cannibalism.
-Aliens invade and then there’s a twist. Usually this is riffing off "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Either the aliens or the humans behave in a very silly manner. Cannibalism might be involved.
-The aliens have already conquered the world and then there’s a twist, sometimes involving cannibalism.
Now, there are some mighty fine stories out there involving aliens, cannibalism, and sometimes sodomy, but you have to realize that those stories are not just standing on their own merits, they’re competing against all the other stories out there that I’ve already rejected.
On the whole though, I think SPACE SQUID is fortunate in it’s surprisingly high-quality slush. We’ve become what we’ve always intended to become, a gutter that collects all the weird un-definable category-violating stories that much better markets have rejected. The problem with alien-cannibalism stories is they’re very definable, so if they make it all the way down the market slope to SPACE SQUID, then there’s probably a reason for that rejection.
