Welcome to Best SF – reviewing SF short stories on the web since April 16th 2000. Yes really.
My initial focus when setting up the site was to build on work I had been doing for some years in collecting, reading and summarising the various ‘Year’s Best SF’ anthologies going back to the 1950s. I quickly moved on to reading a lot of magazine and anthology SF and started reviewing those issues and stories as well.
However, once I swopped commuting on the train (many many hours a week to read) to commuting by car, the amount of reading I was doing reduced dramatically.
In 2016 I happily took a redundancy option from the Day Jobbe, in what amounted to a form of early retirement, but my plans of spending hours each day in a chair catching up on my SF reading backlog, somehow didn’t work out. I went and set up a nano-brewery (Watsons Brewery), alongside running another website (Essex Days Out), and there’s cycling, walking the dog, gardening, and any number of other things (does this make me a Renaissance Man, or dilettante?).
So I refocussed my efforts to once again just cover the Year’s Best SF stories. and to just read and review/summarise the few dozen stories that appear in the Year’s Best SF anthologies each year, and to work my way through dozens of so previously published Year’s Best SF anthologies dating back to the 1950s which currently sit unread on my bookshelves.
And recently, having reached 66, I’ve closed down the brewery and gone for a proper retirement, alongside my wife, who I’ve been with since 1980. Ahhhh. So who knows, maybe a bit more SF reading?
Cheers!
Mark Watson
mark.watson(at)bestsf.net