Introduction

This Digital Miscellany

by Robert Sward,
Guest Editor for eSCENE 1996.


The word anthology comes from the Greek anthos (flower) and logia (collecting). An anthology is a garland, a treasury, a miscellany representing the gleanings and judgment of one or more editors. Series Editor Jeff Carlson describes eSCENE as the world's first anthology of the best Internet-published short fiction, enabling readers to pick up the year's finest electronically published short stories without having to download a random collection of epubs. "With the number of ezines rapidly increasing," he says, "readers just aren't making the time to read through four or five publications they're not familiar with."


eSCENE 1996 is also an electronic literary stage, a review or compendium in cyberspace. As a "best of" collection, it also serves to showcase new writers and the growing community of online magazines that are publishing them.


What is the process for selecting the World's Best Online Fiction?



  1. Jeff Carlson and Assistant Editor Shannon Christenot begin by querying ezine editors for the top stories they published in the previous year. 
    


  2. Jeff and Shannon request permission from the authors. Stories are not formatted or read until the author gives his/her permission for review to avoid copyright violation; the author, for example, may have submitted the story to another market.
    


  3. When permission is received, Jeff and Shannon read the stories and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. This year, beginning with 117 short stories, they narrowed the field down to 21. Anonymous, identified only by a number, these 21 were sent to the Guest Editor (yours truly) who chose what he felt were the nine best.
    


  4. Jeff, Shannon and I agreed on all but 3 of the winners. It took a while -- email messages flew up and back between Seattle, WA and Santa Cruz, CA -- but we eventually came to a decision we could live with.






I agreed to serve as eSCENE's Guest Editor (an unpaid, honorary position) because of my interest in online publishing and fascination with the work I've recently discovered at this eSCENE site. But I need to acknowledge to readers of eSCENE 1996 that I began reading contributions to the anthology with certain expectations. I imagined I'd see more science fiction or fantasy, more writing that reflected the language and culture of cyberspace. eSCENE and many other online magazines, after all, are associated in some readers' minds with what has been called "fiction in a postmodern medium." Bizarre, hip, cool, weirdly psychedelic, satiric, laugh-out-loud narratives like Pat Dillon's interactive The Last Best Thing, serialized this Spring in the San Jose Mercury News.


It was a surprise, therefore, to receive so many promising stories written in a traditional manner, with careful attention to the details of structure, plot, setting and character. Apart from the story "Wife," a hypermedia piece, many of this year's winners might also have found a home in traditional hard copy magazines. Different as they are from one another, I admire and would not have been surprised to see "Spots," "Eating Buzzards," and "Pandora's Dogs," for example, in good literary quarterlies. 


One of my favorites of the 21 stories I read is "Spots," which I recommend for its quirky, oddball humor, its effective use of dialogue and air of menace (which erupts into violence). Not everyone will agree, but to my mind "Spots" is a believable and memorable story. 


Overall, the quality of the submissions I read was high, and I found it difficult to decide, for example, which warranted a 2 (among the best), and which a 1 (Tops!). Some pieces I read were under two pages and, to my mind, needed development. Others, however well-written they were, appeared to be anecdotal sketches lifted from someone's autobiography. As editor/reader/judge, I tended to favor those that were well-crafted, believable -- in terms of plot and characterization -- and written with wit, originality and a distinctive point of view and voice.


Those were my standards. The nine stories I selected were those that came closest to fulfilling those ideals.


It was a pleasure reading this material. Quarrel with the decisions of the editors or not, I guarantee you, the reader, will be provoked and challenged by this most unusual garland, this treasury, this miscellany from cyberspace.


For now, congratulations to the winners whose names, even as I write this, are unknown to me. And thanks to all those who contributed to eSCENE 1996.



Robert Sward, Guest Editor for eSCENE 1996.

Santa Cruz, CA 




eSCENE 1996

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