Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Amazing, 2004
It's nice to be able to do a summary of the fiction from Amazing Stories! The magazine that wouldn't die -- or perhaps more accurately, the magazine that has died and been reincarnated several times -- returned again in 2004.
The primary focus of the new magazine is visual media. The covers of the first four issues feature SpiderMan, Sky Captain, Star Wars, and The Incredibles. But the magazine features a regular section of fiction, four or five stories per month. And they've managed to attract lots of prominent names -- I'm guessing they pay well. So far, the likes of Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Joe Haldeman, Bruce Sterling, Gene Wolfe, and Jack Williamson have appeared here.
The first issue was dated September, and there have been four monthly issues so far. There were a total of 19 stories, mostly fairly short, for a total of about 66,000 words of fiction. One story (Larry Tritten's "The Man From Breakneck") seemed just barely a novelette, the others were all short stories. Four were short-shorts -- each month the magazine commissions a story of 1000 words to be written based on an illustration. (Get it? "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words"?) I will caution that my wordcounts for this magazine are extremely questionable -- the formatting makes this possibly the most difficult magazine to do counts for.
So far I've rather liked Amazing's fiction. Standouts include Ray Vukcevich's "Human Subjects" (September), an odd little thing about a guy convinced he has an alien companion, and how this affects his lovelife; James Van Pelt's "A Wow Finish" (November), about time travelers viewing the opening night of CASABLANCA; Leslie What's "The Mutable Borders of Love" (November), a look at love affairs as quite literal competitions; and Larry Tritten's "The Man From Breakneck", a really strange Western set in a fantastical milieu complete with a sex-mad Dale Evans and literal ghost towns and more weird stuff -- funny and also just plain interesting. I also liked Patrick Weekes's two short stories about a talking sword, and stories by Paul Di Filippo, Gene Wolfe, and Steve Carper.
