Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Anthologies: Hardcover, 2004
This is a convenient way to group six rather diverse anthologies, that all came out in hardcover from major publishers. Perhaps not surprisingly, this includes some of the best books of the year. The six books I roped together this way are:
- The First Heroes, edited by Harry Turtledove and Noreen Doyle;
- Night Visions 11, edited by Bill Sheehan;
- Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio;
- Between Worlds, edited by Robert Silverberg;
- The Faery Reel, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling;
- Crossroads, edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan.
Subtotals: 84 stories (12 novellas, 30 novelettes, 42 short stories (2 short-shorts)), about 800,000 words. (Crossroads, I should add, included a substantial quantity (about half the book) of reprint stories, not included in the total above.)
This is a rather impressive set of books. In one way or another, these are all books that succeeded at what they tried to do, which is all you can really ask. I suppose one ought to say that Night Visions 11 sticks out as "one of these things is not like the others" -- it's a middle of the road collection of horror novellas, none a true standout, none a stinker either, the best being Kim Newman's nearly novel-length "Swellhead". The other anthologies all included really outstanding stories -- if in some cases some pretty weak stories too.
One thing I appreciate is seeing 12 novellas, some very long, among the stories in these books. The best of the novellas was "Giliad" by Gregory Feeley (The First Heroes), my favorite novella of the year. (Though there is more buzz about Feeley's other novella, "Arabian Wine", which is certainly an outstanding story too!) "Giliad" is a post-9/11 story (actually written starting before 9/11/2001 and finished afterwards), about a woman studying Sumer and dreaming of a Sumerian girl in midst of war, while her husband beta-tests a Civilization-like game about Sumer, and around them the terrible events of our time unfold. Other top novellas include two from Between Worlds: "The Wreck of the Godspeed" by James Patrick Kelly and "Investments" by Walter Jon Williams. The former is about an AI starship that starts acting erratically, and the strange fate of the people who transmat to the ship to crew it; the latter is set after Williams' Praxis series, and concerns some shady post-war investments.
Other strong novellas: Stephen Baxter's "Between Worlds" (Between Worlds); Gene Wolfe's "Golden City Far" (Flights); and Harry Turtledove's "The Horse of Bronze" (The First Heroes).
Of the novelettes the best was Kelly Link's "The Faery Handbag" (The Faery Reel), one of my favorite stories of the year, about a teenaged girl with an eccentric grandmother who claims to have a village in her handbag. Really neat stuff. I also greatly enjoyed Gene Wolfe's "The Lost Pilgrim", about a modern man time travelling to the Argo, which begins as something of a comedy, and closes rather darkly and quite movingly.
Other good novelettes: two more from The Faery Reel: Delia Sherman's "CATNYP" and Bruce Glassco's "Never Never"; Tim Powers's "Pat Moore" (Flights), and the late Poul Anderson's "The Bog Sword" (The First Heroes).
Now to the short stories. Don Webb's "Ool Athag" (Crossroads) is about a man who passes from the waking world to the Dreamworld in search of Ool Athag. After long journeying, he finds it, but of what value is what he finds? Jeffrey Ford's "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" (The Faery Reel) is a bittersweet story about a creature that colonizes a sandcastle and lives only until it washes away. Marian Moore's debut story appeared in Crossroads, and I really liked it: "The Mikado's Favorite Song", about a woman driven to succeed at her job, and the terrible price she pays.
I should also mention three more stories from Crossroads: Bud Webster's "Christus Destitutus", James L. Cambias's "See My King All Dressed in Red", and Marian Carcache's "The Moon and the Stars". Also, Jeffrey Ford's "Jupiter's Skull" (Flights) and Emma Bull's "De La Tierra" (The Faery Reel). Finally, The First Heroes feature a long narrative poem, "The Myrmidons", by Larry Hammer, that deserves a look.
