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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2768240" data-attributes="member: 5171">Honestly, and this is lousy of me to say as somebody who still tries to sell short stories... not really.I had a subscription to F&SF for a year, and started making a template for how each issue would go:- Near-future story in which bad things are happening and the protagonist has a chance to do something but then doesn't, because this is the kind of modern story we apparently want to read nowadays, when the protagonist chickens out or doesn't make the choice and then sits on the sidelines while the world passes by in a bad direction.- Crap story from famous author whose name can be put on the cover.- Yet another story that is actually not so much a story as a little riff on quantum physics or quantum entanglement (which seem to be the cool ideas these days) with some characters to move around to get to the punchline.- Random story that is arguably SF/F, but it's a stretch, and is probably only in there because the author also sells SF and F. Really, it's not actually SF at all, but a few unexpected things happen and it's suggested that this is due to the hand of fate, a fantasy convention.- Whatever else the editor has room for.Sometimes one or more of those stories was good, but not always, and not often enough for me to want to re-up my subscription. The combination of a whole lotta writers trying to get into very few slots in a magazine that is running on a shoestring budget and is one step away from cancellation unless each issue continues to do well has resulted in a lot of magazines that don't really do it for me.</blockquote>

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