Game recognizes game: we’re pretty proud of what we’ve built in the three and a half years of the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog’s existence, but there’s no doubt we’ll always be chasing the accomplishments of Tor.com, the internet’s most beloved source for discussion of sci-fi and fantasy books, films, TV, and fandom—as well as a premiere outlet for free, original short fiction. (A confession: we may have modeled the blog on Tor.com, and even been inspired to publish a few short stories.)

This month, the site celebrates its 10th anniversary—a full decade of insightful blog posts, enlightening reviews, occasional heated controversies, the founding of a dedicated publishing imprint, and, oh yeah, the publication of hundreds and hundreds of short stories by some of the most respected authors in genre writing.

To mark the milestone, Tor.com Publishing has created Worlds Seen in Passing: 10 Years of Tor.com Short Fiction, a massive anthology bringing together 40 notable stories the site has published since 2008. But don’t call it a “best of”—per the book’s editor—Irene Gallo, Tor.com publisher and Tor Books creative director—it’s better thought of as a representative sample; to truly assemble the “best” would require both the existence of objective rules for judging art and a page count unsuitable for binding.

We recently talked with Irene about how Tor.com got started, reading hundreds of stories, and the impossible task of building that table of contents.

How did the original plans for Tor.com come about? Was short fiction always a part of the equation?

Fritz Foy, now the publisher of Tor Books, came up with the idea for Tor.com in 2007 or 2008. At the time, he was the head of our technology departments, and part of his mandate was to create experimental businesses that might benefit Macmillan. He pulled Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Hayden and myself aside at the Tor Christmas party with a stack of SFF magazines and said, “We can do this!”

The idea was to create an online space where people could discover new books and debate old favorites with a “rising tide” philosophy. Short fiction was seen as part of that right from the start. Giving away fiction seemed a good way to attract readers. It also gave us reason to establish relationships with more writers and artists than we normally would throughout the year.

How did you justify to those holding the purse strings that it made sense to pay top rates for short stories—and illustrate them—and then give them away for free on the site?

To be honest, that wasn’t too hard. Macmillan is pretty great that way. They knew that to make it successful in the long run, we needed to be competitive and invest time and money. Treating our authors and illustrators well, and making them excited to be published by Tor, is clearly good for us. Everyone wins.

As for the art—I am really grateful they saw the benefits of commissioning art for each story. It, again, comes from the magazine tradition—it’s not new—but it really does help the stories reach an audience. Not only does it catch readers’ eyes, but, it makes the stories easy to share through social media. It also helps us establish relationships with artists we may want to use on book covers. And it’s definitely helped raise our profile with authors. I have to say, I love it when I hear writers talking about wanting to publish a story with us because of the artwork.

How has the publication process changed over the years? The cadence of new stories you’ve published has been fairly remarkable, with 50 to as many as 70 new stories of varying lengths arriving every year, all illustrated!

We didn’t want to be beholden to “issues” the way most magazines are, which gives us a lot of flexibility. That said, we’ve published around 60 to 70 stories a year for a long while. The biggest difference over the past three years is that we are now divided between the website short stories and the commercially available longer books [in the novella line from Tor.com Publishing]. Currently we aim for three free short stories a month on the website, taking off major holiday weeks, and roughly 35 novellas (and increasingly, novels) a year.

The art is a particular blessing to me, especially on the short stories. The magazine as a whole is the “product,” so there isn’t pressure to sell each week’s story. We don’t have the marketing and publicity concerns that we do on a novel—in fact, we don’t even have editorial involved. It’s just me, the story, and the artist. It’s a very pure and direct way to work with art and story. It’s also practical. We’d be buried if we added that much commissioning to the year and included all the steps that [book] jackets normally go through.

As Tor’s art director, it fell to you to commission art for all these stories. How does that process differ from creating a book cover?

The commissioning process is much different for book covers. There’s obvious stuff like incorporating type and being tied to a specific aspect ratio, but the job of the book cover is much harder. It needs to read as a mini billboard [for the book] and fight for attention among a sea of other books and products in stores and online. There’s much more pressure for the book to perform well, which means there are a lot more meetings and checks-and-balances throughout the season.

Has the founding of the novella imprint, Tor.com Publishing, changed the short story process at all? Given that the website sometimes publishes at novelette or novella length, how do you find a story’s proper “home”?

For the short stories, we pretty much give Ellen Datlow, Ann Vandermeer, and the rest of our editors (our Dream Team) carte blanche to buy what they want. Once we broke the novellas off into commercial books, we set up an acquisition process for those titles. We have a team of full-time editors, plus our amazing freelancers, bringing in books. I’ll look them over and talk to each of the editors about those titles. We’ll often get second-reads from our marketing and publicity directors. If it all looks good, I make a case to my boss, and so it goes.

Novelettes are trickier—we have been more fluid with novelettes. Typically we still publish them on the site, but if it’s on the longer side and we feel it has a lot of commercial potential, we’ll publish that as a standalone book. Most recently we did this with Brooke Bolander’s amazing (and heart-wrenching) The Only Harmless Great Thing. These are outliers, but I love that we don’t need to write an option off.

As the 10th anniversary approached, how did you come to the decision to commemorate the milestone with an anthology?

It seemed an obvious “victory lap” to take. We have lots of advantages online, but after 10 years, it seemed time to step back and take stock of the short fiction, and look at it as a collective achievement on its own. [Collectively] it’s an amazing group of writers and stories, and we wanted to give them their place on the shelves. It also opens up these stories to people who just don’t like reading ebooks.

We also put together Rocket Fuel, a free ebook collection of our best essays and articles, which I’d encourage anyone to download. Our non-fiction writers blow me away every day. They’ve provided thoughtful and often funny commentary on pop culture throughout the past ten years—it’s a really great snapshot of the site as a whole.

In your introduction, you mention that you’re the only person to have read every story the site has published, given that you art directed every one of them. What’s that like to consider, after 10 years?

The two biggest gifts Macmillan gave to me are, 1) being able to commission art so freely for the short stories, and 2) bringing me back to short fiction. Before Tor.com, I had forgotten that my gateway drug to SFF was Harlan Ellison. Without apologizing for any of his behavior, the fact is, I can trace a direct line from my stumbling into his work when I was a kid to where I am now. When we started Tor.com and I was suddenly reading short stories again, it was like coming home.

How hard was it to winnow down a decade of stories into one anthology? How did you approach the task? Were there any stories you wanted to include but couldn’t for whatever reason?

OMG, it was the worst! Truly, if I made the anthology today it could be a very different book—no better or worse than the one that stands—which is heartbreaking.

Some hard decisions were made easy—a number of my favorite stories were simply too long to include, like Mary Rickert’s The Mothers of Voorhisville, which is actually a novel; Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan’s World Fantasy Award-winning Wakulla Springs, which would have taken the place of four other stories; and any number of others.

On principle, I ruled out anything that was novella length. If I truly liked two or more stories from one author equally, I let word count be the tie-breaker. (See anything we’ve published by Veronica Schanoes or Rachel Swirsky.) We’ve also published some great comics throughout the years that wouldn’t reproduce well in the book (but please go read Barrie Potter and Wesley Allsbrook’s “To Eternity” on the site!)

Do you have a personal favorite story in the collection?

That really is impossible to answer. I can’t say which is a favorite, but if you want to laugh, check out Aaron Corwin’s “Brimstone and Marmalade.”

If you want to gasp, read “The Language of Knives,” by Haralambi Markov.

If you want something sweet, I loved Kelley Barnhil’ls “Mrs. Sorenson and the Sasquatch.”

N. K. Jemisin’s “The City Born Great” blows me away…

Really, I just love them all, and wish I’d had room for more.

(I also have to thank our designer, Jamie Stafford-Hill, for putting up with me—I kept adding stories that he had to fit into a reasonable page-length.)

From the other side: what stories have had an outsized impact on readers or took off in an unusual way? (I’m thinking of such achievements as Charlie Jane Anders getting a TV deal for “Six Months, Three Days,” but maybe there are other examples?)

That’s an interesting question. There are a few that have received movie options, and others have won awards, but ultimately I think that’s a personal question for each reader.

There are many stories here that feel strongly connected to different points in my own life. Oddly, I’m just realizing how connected to a place each one of these stories is for me—I have such a clear memory where I was when I read them, and of that moment when I fell in love with them. I can only hope many of these stories connect to other readers in their own personal way… I think they will.

Worlds Seen in Passing: 10 Years of Tor.com is available now in hardcover and ebook.