Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Small Press Anthologies
Nothing really links these books, so I'll again treat them separately.
Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction, edited by Robert Kruger and Patrick Swenson, comes from Fairwood Press. It had 16 stories, nominally SF as opposed to fantasy, based on art by Alan Clark. The longest story was 7500 words by my count, right on the short story/novelette border. My favorites were Elisabeth De Vos' "Out of the Fire", about the Phoenix deciding not to die, to the horror of right-to-lifers and environmentalists alike, and David Levine's "Legacy", about a trip to study a supernova and one person's sacrifice. Good stories as well by the likes of Nancy Jane Moore and Ray Vukcevich. Still, an anthology of mostly uninspiring stories.
Low Port, edited by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, comes from Meisha Merlin. Its conceit is stories about people living in "low port" -- the rough areas near the spaceport. I'd rank it mostly with the previous book -- plenty of competent work but little that really stood out. Best were Mark W. Tiedemann's "The Pilgrim Trade", a story from his Secantis sequence, a morally ambiguous story about a boy from a family of squatters who is pushed to murder; and Paul E. Martens's "The Times She Went Away", a sentimental but effective take on the old idea of the spacewoman with a man in every port, and time dilation.
The Book of Final Flesh, edited by James Lowder, is the third and last of a series of anthologies about zombies, published I believe in association with a game, but not necessarily set in the gaming world. Zombies aren't my favorite subject matter at all, and reading a whole bunch of stories on the same subject back to back doesn't help. But Lowder does a pretty good job within those constraints. I.e., it's not a great book by any means, but better than I expected. Not as good as last year's book in the series, but there were OK stories by Martens again, by Mark McLaughlin, and best of all probably was "The Blonde", by Sarah A. Hoyt.
