Why Was the "Strange New Worlds" Book Series Ended?

Granted I didn't care for it too much or think the stories were very good, but I was curious as to why it ended.

Not to deny that ten years was a decent run.

 

It didn't make money.

 

The anthologies never sold all that well, and with each year, they sold less and less. After #10, they went below the threshold where it was in any conceivable way viable to continue the series.

Honestly, I'm stunned it made it to ten years. When the series debuted, I didn't think it would make it past Volume 5.

 

How about an official website where stories like this can be submitted?

 

That would hardly improve matters, as the stories would still have to be paid for.....

 

Oh well.

The stories were not very good anyway.

Though I thought highly of the one I submitted the first year (I'm not certain it made it by the deadline).

 

You'd need a professional editor to edit the stories and at least one employee to work through the slush. And that costs money, and as has been mentioned, SNW didn't make enough to make such a thing viable.

Even if the licensors somehow got nuts enough to open an official website and leave it for fans to post stories to, without some sort of check and balance on the stories being submitted the website could be filled with any manner of drek, with the very occasional gem finding its way through.

Sorta like the SNW contest itself. Dean Wesley Smith had the patience of a saint to work through some 40,000 submissions over 10 years in order to select the 200-odd stories that he felt of sufficient quality to make it into the SNW anthologies.

 

But you read at least some of them and maybe even bought a book or two, so thank you for that, at least. Whether it was one of the books I was in or not doesn't matter; that you supported at least a few of my fellow SNW writers is enough to balance out your sweeping generalization.

 

Thank you.

They are pretty cheap when you get them used.

And the cover art was often interesting.

 

Normally I wouldn't do this but-

Dude. You couldn't possibly have read all the stories and have that opinion.

ISOLATION WARD 4 kicked ASS! (for instance)
THE BEGINNING
LIFE'S WORK

Seriously. There's just no way.

 

'The Immortality Blues' was, I think, my favorite SNW story ever written, and one of my favorite Trek stories in general.

Also, could somebody remind me which SNW story was a semi sequel to 'The Alternative Factor'?

Spoiler: SNW

In it, both versions of Lazarus - the 'matter' and 'antimatter' ones - are freed from the corridor and deposited on their respective universes' versions of Bajor. We learn that they're both sane, and they have both married Bajoran girls and have families.

 

SNW was my one guaranteed book purchase every year. I discovered it with volume five, and... man, was I ever bummed when it ended. I still haven't read the last story in SNW 10, because I don't want it to be over.

Submitted a few one year. Bad call on my part. :P

 

Man, does my face hurt from all those backhanded, bitchslapping compliments!

--Ted

 

I was so disappointed to find out that the series would not continue. I'd hoped it was merely an oversight when the submission rules weren't in #10... then I got the unsettled feeling that perhaps that meant there would be no more volumes...

Then I was way beyond disappointed, as I'd finally made up my mind to submit something I thought would be suitable.

But mostly, I miss the wonderful stories everybody wrote.

How anybody can say "the stories were not very good anyway" is beyond my understanding. Sure, some of them weren't my cup of tea. But some were outstanding -- I can't recall offhand who wrote the one about the origins of the Borg, but I wish he/she would expand that into a novel, because it was EXCELLENT! I got chills reading it, and it's a very logical extrapolation of how the Borg could have been created.

I hope that someday there will be other anthology series... these books are pricey in Canada, and I always bought them new. So don't blame their demise on me -- I did my share!

 

I've long wondered how the number of people who sent in stories compared to the number of people who bought the books, and how many of the people who sent in stories bought the books. In the once-plentiful "I sent in my stories" threads, a lot of people gave the impression that they wanted to be published in SNW but had no interest in reading it.

 

^

That makes sense. No one likes reading their own work. Just like a movie or TV show, where the actor doesn't like watching themselves on screen and try to avoid doing so at all costs.

 

What exactly was the threshold below which it was non-viable?

 

That would be "Reborn" by Jeremy Yoder, which was the very last story in the very last volume.

There were two Borg-origin stories in SNW. "The Beginning" by Annie Reed (SNW VI) showed the "birth" of the Borg Queen in the distant past on some unknown world, and "Forgotten Light" by Frederick Kim (SNW VII) shows the Enterprise-E crew discovering the Borg's homeworld (which, oddly enough, is not in the Delta Quadrant).

 

Our Million-Year Mission is one of the very best Trek stories ever told in any medium.