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Summary: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, 2004
The Australian Magazine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine continued to publish with very impressive regularity for a smaller press 'zine. It has now put out 15 issues, on a very consistent bimonthly schedule. Part of this regularity may be due to being produced by an editorial collective, rotating the top job every issue. The magazine is particularly noted for its bias towards light-hearted stories -- lots of humor, lots of short-shorts.
The issues are each labeled with two months for a date, and I list them by the later month (in part because I usually don't see the magazine until the last month of the date -- this likely due to the time it takes mail to reach the US from Down Under). Thus the six issues I am treating here begin with #10, December 2003-January 2004, and run through #15, October-November 2004. These issues included 63 stories, one a reprint. There were 1 novella, 10 novelettes, and 52 short stories (15 of the latter being "short-shorts"), a total of 63 stories and some 284,000 words of fiction. The reprint was a novelette, leaving about 275,000 words of new fiction. This is generally consistent with past years.
I will note that word counting is very difficult for this magazine, as they play many tricks with font sizes and line spacing. So my category counts, and total word count, certainly could be off by a bit.
Novellas
The only novella this year was Stephen Dedman's "The Whole of the Law"(June-July). an entertaining adventure story about a spaceship crew on an anarchist planet and the possibility of artificial humans being enslaved. I thought it enjoyable but a bit disappointing -- I expected something rather more ambitious than I eventually got.
Novelettes
Perhaps the best novelette this year at ASIM was Ruth Nestvold's "Wooing Ai Kyarem" (December-January), about a female nomadic chief, facing a challenge to her authority in the form of a disturbingly attractive suitor. Oddly enough, two more novelette from the same issue also rank highly in my mind: Paul Marlowe's* "A Visit from Prospero", an odd steampunkish science fantasy story with overtones of The Tempest; and Lucinda Case's "Sweet Dreams", a fantasy mystery. Stories by Barbara Robson, Ben Cook, and Martens were also worthwhile. *this had previously been noted as by Paul E. Martens
Short Stories
Of the regular length short stories, I particularly liked Bren MacDibble's "Lost Property" (August-September), a neat SF horror piece about an unethical lost property merchant who claims a potentially valuable box belonging to aliens, and the nasty surprise he gets when he opens it. Also, Edo Mor's "Arabica Beans" is a sweet light romance about a djinn fleeing an efreet who ends up in a coffee bean, and how this affects two people who meet in a coffee shop. John Borneman's "A Wall of Brass" (February-March) is a fine story about a gentle post-crash civilization faced with invasion from a more violent group, and the price they pay for safety. Also from February-March, I liked Lee Battersby's "Ecdysis", a mystery with a magic-based solution, about a mysterious completely black body that turns up in an LA garbage dump.
And I should mention some of the short-shorts. The August-September issue featured a bunch of short-shorts about Baron Munchausen by Stuart Barrow and Mark Bruckard. Quite fun, clever, stuff. And from the October-November issue, I was very amused by Ian Creasey's "Reality 2.0", in which Microsoft upgrades mathematics.
Stats
For the record -- the average novella this year was 28000 words (sample of 1!), the average novelette, a fairly short 9200 words, and the average short story, a quite short 3150 words (due to the many short-shorts).
