Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Abyss & Apex, 2004
Abyss & Apex is an e-zine available at www.abyssandapex.com. Abyss & Apex is nominally a bi-monthly magazine, and they did manage 6 issues this year, but with some delays and some eccentric dating. (Technical problems such as spam attacks and a hard drive crash apparently contributed.) The editorial staff includes Adrienne Allmann, Benjamin Buchholz, Carol Burrell, Aleta Daknis, Rachel R. Hartman, Sonya M. Sipes, and Amy Valleau.
Abyss & Apex published a total of 27 stories this year. The total word count was about 68,000. There was one novelette, and 14 of the 26 short stories were short-shorts. (One issue was a special "Flash" issue.) (The novelette was a bit over 8000 words long, and the short stories averaged 2300 words.)
My favorite story was probably Steve Wilson's "My Duties Aboard Ship", about a space pirate captain, his wife, and the narrator, an evidently misshapen man who is the captain's first mate and the wife's lover. I also liked a narrative poem (which I list as a short story because of its length and the fact that it's narrative) by Larry Hammer, "Her First Affair", about a lonely AI piloting a spaceship between the galaxies. (This is one of two fine narrative poems I saw this year from Hammer -- the other was a fantasy, "The Myrmidons", in the anthology _The First Heroes_.) Other strong stories came from Steve Carper, Tracina Jackson-Adams, Will McIntosh, Hannah Wolf-Bowen, Mikal Trimm, and Barth Anderson.
