Strange New Worlds coming to an end

Just saw this at Jim Johnson's livejournal. The Strange New Worlds winners have been announced over at simonsays.com, and part of the announcement is some bad news that doesn't come entirely as a surprise:

"As of 2007, we will be discontinuing the publication of Strange New Worlds. "

Dean Wesley Smith had announced that this was his last time doing this, and finding another editor to take this on would have been a real challenge. And when Marco Palmieri said that Pocket crunched the numbers on SNW every year, that it was never an easy, automatic, guaranteed sure thing, I started worrying more.

Strange New Worlds has been the launching pad for several of the best writers working for Pocket these days. There are other ways in -- S.C.E. has a pretty good record, too, and Marco has found a number of new writers elsewhere, but SNW attracted thousands of eager would-be writers. Not the most obviously reliable source of new talent, necessarily -- short stories and novels are very different things -- but we did get a lot of good new contributors to the Star Trek universe.

SNW was something else, too: a regular source of short fiction in the Star Trek universe. Maybe it's because I grew up on the Blish and Foster adaptations and read and reread Star Trek: The New Voyages, but I've always thought there was a place for short fiction in the Trek universe. The last few years have seen a number of pro-written anthologies, like The Lives of Dax, No Limits, and so on, but SNW featured stories from every Trek TV incarnation in the pages of a single book. I'd like to see some kind of wide open anthologies continue, though obviously the fan contest element is over and done.

For now, though, congratulations to the winners of the final Strange New Worlds contest!