is that a headache or am I just awake?

(I think it's a little of both. Too much wine, pizza delivery guy lost our order until halfway through Battlestar Gallactica. Also, bad art in the presence of good company.)

Matt Cheney pointed to a letter the divinely southern Andy Duncan wrote Locus about SF writers and the big dog literary short story annual anthologies. I find it so interesting, I'm going to blockquote it in whole below:

Dear Locus Online,

In my most recent incarnation as an academic, I actually presented a paper on the sf magazines and the canonical year's-best anthologies, namely The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards series. Harlan Ellison [regarding his interview comment in the July 2001 issue of Locus Magazine] has reason to be proud. Before "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," only three stories from sf magazines ever were reprinted in The Best American Short Stories volumes, and all three were from F&SF in the 1950s: "Dead Center" by Judith Merril, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" by Shirley Jackson, and "The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon. The only O. Henry volume selection from an sf magazine, to my knowledge, was from Ellen Datlow's Omni in the 1990s, as was the Ellison: "Unidentified Objects" by James P. Blaylock.
If one goes looking through the volumes not for stories from sf magazines but for stories by sf writers, the pickings aren't quite as slim. In the Best American series, one finds Michael Bishop (1 appearance), Nelson Bond (1), Jack Cady (4), Charles G. Finney (1), Ursula K. Le Guin (2) and Ray Bradbury (4). In the O. Henry volumes, one finds Peter S. Beagle (1), Miriam Allen deFord (2), Thomas M. Disch (2), Stephen King (1), William Kotzwinkle (1), Joanna Russ (1) and Ray Bradbury again (2). All these writers, however, are represented by stories originally published outside the sf magazines, from The New Yorker onward.

Andy Duncan
15 July 2001

The third SF writer in this year's volume of BASS (whose story was not published in a specifically SF venue -- another hint for the guessers -- but in a place that's published at least one other original science fiction short story in the last year or so) still hasn't spilled. I'll keep an eye on it and update when s/he has.