The Six Hundred

Original Post: 7 May 2013
Posted Here: 1 December 2017

In "The Charge of the Light Brigade" Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote "Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred." The sentence reminds me of something that I heard while attending the 2011 John W. Campbell Science Fiction Conference at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Sheila Williams, Editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, spoke at the Conference. During one of the sessions, Ms. Williams mentioned that Asimov's received about six hundred submissions per month. I just went to my bookshelf and pulled off a random copy of the magazine. It was the August 2012 issue and it contained four novelettes, four short stories, and four poems.

Out of six hundred submissions, twelve fiction items made it. The numbers vary with the source, but, out of around six hundred members of the Light Brigade, 390 survived. Just considering the odds (not necessarily a wise choice,) it looks like we would have better luck charging into the cannons than submitting our science fiction for publication.

I would, however, prefer to take my chances with Sheila Williams and the editors of the other SF magazines. Twelve out of six hundred are not such bad odds: it's 50 to 1. But my point is not about the odds of getting published. I just want to remind myself, and you, that with the limits placed on a science fiction magazine even the best stories must sometimes be rejected.

Someone once said, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. Don't be bullheaded." Davy Crockett said, "Always be sure you're right, then go ahead." If you're sure your writing is good, then it's not bullheaded to go ahead and keep submitting it. Eventually you'll be one of those survivors.

Keep reading, keep writing - Jack