Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Electric Velocipede, 2004
John Klima's Electric Velocipede continues to appear twice a year. This year we saw issues 6 and 7. I think the magazine has been constantly improving, and this was its best year. There were a total of 21 stories, all short (5 "short-shorts), for some 51,000 words overall. (That makes the average story length about 2400 words.)
My favorite story was "A Keeper", by Alan De Niro, from the Spring issue. This is a deliriously weird story set in a version of Brazil, ruled by a King Juan Juan. The King requires all artists to paint only portraits of himself, and the story concerns one such artist -- but it gets much stranger. From Spring I also like William Shunn's "Why I Think I'll be Staying Home Tonight", about a man refusing to go on a date with an attractive woman -- and the reason why. From the Fall issue I liked Liz Williams's "The Marsella" best, a phantasmagoric exploration of Barcelona via the agency of absinthe, in which a young British man meets a Goddess and fights a Dragon. And Andrew Cohen's "Dark Bloom" is a strong SF horror story about a science writer, a single father, who agrees to investigate some strange flowers at the behest of his stepfather.
