Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Anthologies: DAW, 2004
This includes 11 mass market paperbacks in what is sometimes called DAW's "monthly magazine". That's all the original DAW anthologies, I believe -- the missing month was occupied by a paperback reprint of the 2003 hardcover anthology _Stars_. (I made a special effort this year to read all the DAW anthologies.)
The books:
- Microcosms, edited by Gregory Benford;
- The Magic Shop, edited by Denise Little;
- Space Stations, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers;
- Conqueror Fantastic, edited by Pamela Sargent;
- Faerie Tales, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis;
- Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers;
- Sirius: The Dog Star, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Alexander Potter;
- ReVisions, edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel;
- Haunted Holidays, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis;
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXI, edited by Diana L. Paxson;
- Rotten Relations, edited by Denise Little.
Subtotals: 11 books, 164 new stories (2 novellas, 40 novelettes, 122 short stories (2 short-shorts)), just over a million words.
The DAW anthologies remain of a piece for the most part. They tend to be built around fairly narrow themes, often just a shade too cute. As far as I know the anthologies are invitation-only, and I fear that that and the narrow themes tend to produce uninspired stories. There are of course exceptions. The ongoing Sword and Sorceress has a fairly broad theme, and Diana Paxson's editorship may revitalize a series that had become very very stale under Bradley's aegis. And three of this year's DAW books stood above their fellows: Microcosms, Conqueror Fantastic, and ReVisions. In each case I would argue that the themes were broader than in other cases, and not so fatally cute.
The two novellas were both by Michelle West, who tends to write long. I enjoy her work in general, though neither of these novellas rose above "enjoyable". Her best story this year was a substantial novelette, "The Stolen Child" (Faerie Tales), about a man reclaiming his lost child from the Queen of Faerie: the faerie imagery nicely framing a human story, a stark and uncompromising look at a damaged marriage and a sincerely sad but not blameless man.
Other fine novelettes included "Palace Resolution" by Tom Purdom (Microcosms), about a civil war between rival factions in an asteroid habitat over the way to deal with an alien probe. "Unwirer", by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross (ReVisions), tells of an alternate present in which draconian laws allegedly aimed at copyright protection have crippled the Internet. Paul Di Filippo's "Observable Things" (Conqueror Fantastic) places Robert E. Howard's
Of the short stories I particularly liked two more from ReVisions: "A Call From the Wild" by Doranna Durgin, an alternate history in which dogs are never domesticated; and "Axial Axioms", by James Alan Gardner, which speculates on the possible effect of more focus on math by the philosophers of the Axial Age, such as Confucius. Kij Johnson's "The Empress Jingu Fishes" (Conqueror Fantastic) is a short, beautiful, evocation of a Japanese Empress. Richard Parks's "Voices in an Empty Room" (Haunted Holidays) is an Eli Mothersbaugh story, in which the ghost finder looks for ghosts of a terrorist attack. Robert Sheckley's "Rapunzel: The True Story" (Rotten Relations) is a Sheckleyan reimagining of that classic fairy tale, from the point of view of the father -- sort of. And the one reprint, Geoffrey Landis's 1995 story "Ouroboros" (Microcosms) is a twisty story of computer simulations.
