Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Editorial ambition is easy to romanticize; Schmidt makes it sound like production management with a conscience. The key word is "Ideally" - a small throat-clear that admits the gap between taste and logistics. He wants "every issue" to be a curated microcosm, not a grab bag: "a diverse group of stories" signals variety as a design principle, while "meet the qualifications sketched above" hints at an earlier, probably hard-nosed rubric. Diversity here isn't a slogan; it's a constraint system. You can almost see the editor's checklist: quality baseline first, then range.

The subtext is the quiet tension every magazine editor lives with: breadth versus coherence, novelty versus standards, ambition versus the reality of what lands in the slush pile. By pairing "wide range" with "specific matter and flavour", Schmidt underscores that distinction. He's not chasing genre diversity in the abstract; he's chasing differences you can taste on the page - subject matter, voice, texture, risk. "Flavour" also slyly frames fiction as something consumed, which is both accurate and slightly unsentimental. Readers don't just want excellence; they want contrast, the palate cleanser after the heavy course.

Contextually, this reads like an editor articulating a house philosophy for science fiction: protect the magazine's identity without calcifying it. The phrase "sketched above" suggests a pragmatic, process-oriented conversation, not a manifesto. Schmidt is making the case that curation isn't gatekeeping for its own sake; it's how you keep an issue from feeling like a monoculture with different costumes.