Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Anthologies: Small Press, 2004
Again, a convenient way to group several diverse anthologies. Perhaps slightly more surprisingly, this group also includes some of the best anthologies of the year. The four books I placed in this group were:
- Leviathan 4: Cities, edited by Forrest Aguirre;
- Polyphony 4, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake;
- All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, edited by David Moles and Jay Lake;
- Scattered, Covered, Smothered, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg.
Subtotals: 77 stories total, of which two were reprints. Of the 75 new stories, there were: 1 novella, 18 novelettes, 56 short stories (15 of them "short-shorts"), for a total of about 435,000 words total, 417,000 of them new to 2004.
This is an excellent set of anthologies from the small press. The true standout was All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, which I expected to be mostly japery but which in fact is full of neat and substantial stories -- and a few japes. Polyphony 4 continues that fine new anthology series's strong run. Leviathan 4: Cities is also a fine number in consistently interesting series. And Scattered, Covered, Smothered is a perhaps less substantial -- it's certainly much shorter -- but it's still nice, a collection of sometimes amusing, sometimes dark, short pieces about food, mixed in with a number of poems and recipes.
The one novella was Lucius Shepard's "The Blackpool Ascensions", which didn't do much for me. (There was also a reprint, of novella or long novelette length, Howard Waldrop's "You Can Go Home Again", a strong piece.)
Of the novelettes, my favorite was "Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum", by Benjamin Rosenbaum (All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories), a wild AH in which the author, a Plausible Fiction writer, speculates about heavier-than-air flight while engaging in a wild adventure. "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" by Theodora Goss (Polyphony 4) is a moving story of a violin teacher who wants to fly to the flying city of Orillion. "The Soul Bottles" by Jay Lake (Leviathan 4: Cities) is a striking tale of a young man ruined when the fashion for "soul bottles" crashes. KJ Bishop's "We the Enclosed" (Leviathan 4: Cities) is a tour de force following the protagonist through door after door to a variety of different rooms and landscapes. Other strong novelettes were "Three Days in a Border Town" by Jeff VanderMeer (Polyphony 4), "The Wizard of Wardenclyffe" by Ursula Pflug (Leviathan 4: Cities) and "Sky Light" by David Brin (All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories).
I was really taken by the Ken Liu's short story "State Change" (Polyphony 4), about a woman with an ice cube for a soul (literally). Also from Polyphony 4, Tim Pratt's "Hart and Boot" is a strange Western fantasy about a woman who summons a spectral outlaw. The best stories from Scattered, Covered, Smothered were Rhys Hughes's tale of an unusual recipe for writer's block: "Grumblebelly", and M. F. Korn, Des Lewis, and Jeff VanderMeer's cute take on Lovecraft as a restaurant them: "The Strange Case of the Lovecraft Café". From All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories I liked two Hindenburg themed short stories, James L. Cambias's "The Eckener Alternative" and James Van Pelt's "Where and When". The first focuses on stopping Hitler's plans by means of altering the history of zeppelins. The second links time travel and disasters such as the Hindenburg fire. From the same book I also like David D. Levine's baroque tale of living zeppelins, floating houses, and zombies, "Love in the Balance", and Leslie What's ghost story with balloon, "Why a Duck", and one more "livin zeppelin" piece, Paul Berger's "Voice of the Hurricane".
The small press is in recent years a crucial source of short fiction -- both original anthologies and single-author collections. No doubt this is primarily a result of the changing economics of publishing. Be that as it may, the devoted reader will find plenty of outstanding stories in books from non-name publishers.
