Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Fortean Bureau, 2004
Fortean Bureau is an e-zine available at www.forteanbureau.com. They have been around since 2002 and have posted a total of 28 issues plus a teaser. Fortean Bureau posted 12 monthly issues this year. Two of those didn't exactly feature "stories", though they did provide interesting content. The February issue included a number of descriptions of unusual "libations" -- pretty amusing stuff. The April issue, as part of a fundraising drive, printed shopping lists provided by a number of writers. The other ten issues each included 4 stories -- though there were two parts to a serialized novella, making the total for the year 39 stories, one of them a novella, the rest shorts (4 of them short-shorts). The novella was a bit over 20,000 words, and the short stories totaled about 122,000 words (average length -- just about 3000 words), thus, some 132,000 words of new fiction.
I don't know how strict the guidelines are, but the zine clearly is interest in stories that might be influenced by Charles Fort-type ideas: lost continents, weird irruptions into regular life, legendary beings like the yeti.
The one novella was "Lantean Sands", by Rudi Dornemann, one of the more interesting newer writers. It's about a small-time gangster working in "Lantis Town", collecting protection money mostly. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Atlantic City, I suppose (not that I've been there), complete with attractions like "Manta Boy". But this summer there will be an attempt to restore the lost glory of the "Lantis Archipelago". It's an interesting story -- probably a bit too long for its own good, but not bad stuff at all. (The Atlantis connection is just the sort of "Fortean" theme that apparently gives the zine its name.)
Of the short stories I put little stars by quite a few. Tobias Buckell's "Her" (January) is about a woman the size of a planet (or at least an asteroid). Also from January, Pam McNew's "Five Little Girls" is five sharp vignettes each about a different little girl. Greg Beatty's "Aliens Enter the Conversation" (March) is a fun meditation on the treatment of aliens in SF and in mundane life. May was particularly good: Patricia Russo's "With Your Arms Around Me" is a deadpan creepy story about a girl heading up her family after her mother's death even though her dead mother is still around. Nick Mamatas's "Jitterbuggin'" is simply a letter from one "HPL" to a later writer named Jack, with "Grandpa HPL" telling of an unsettling dream. And Deborah Layne's "The Legend of Jake Einstein" is a delightful rendition of Physics as Western.
From August I was impressed by Lavie Tidhar's "The Gimatria of Pi", linking the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin to a numerological analysis of the digits of pi. September featured a wacky piece by John Schoffstahl: "Clockwork Dragons Must Die!". And November had two particularly nice stories. Chelsea Polk's "If One Should Pass This Way Again" is a disquieting short-short about a woman reliving the day of her rape. Lane Robins's "The World in Words" is a lovely story about a man who loves books so much that he comes to enter one.
I really enjoy this online 'zine -- I'd rank it third overall among online SF 'zine in 2004.
