Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: "Miscellaneous" sources, 2004
I have only four of these summaries yet to do. In one I will cover original stories I read in single author collections. In another I will cover one more SF magazine, Bill Rupp's Continuum. (I need to get one more issue of the magazine.) In a third I will pick up whatever anthologies I have not yet covered, including Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo and (I plan) Gothic! And in this post I cover stories I saw in "miscellaneous" places: non-SF magazine and websites like the New Yorker and Salon, and author's websites, mainly. This accounted for 26 stories, 14 of them short shorts, only one a novelette, for a total of just under 67,000 words of fiction.
The New Yorker typically publishes some 3 to 5 stories with what I judge to be fantastical content each year. This year I saw four: "Long Ago Yesterday", by Hanif Kureishi; "Super Goat Man", by Jonathan Lethem; "Cat'n'Mouse", by Steven Millhauser; and "Miracle", by Judy Budnitz. My favorite was Millhauser's story, an arch piece about a Tom'n'Jerry-like pair of cartoon animals thinking about their relationship. Lethem's story, a rather morose thing about an unusual superhero, was also interesting.
Salon.com also regularly publishes SF. This year I saw three pieces (I may possibly have missed some): "Retroactive Anti-Terror", by Alex Irvine; "Miscarriage of Justice", by Robert J. Howe; and "Anda's Game" by Cory Doctorow. Irvine's story was reprinted in F&SF under the better title "Peter Skilling". "Anda's Game" is clearly the best of these stories, a take on "Ender's Game" in which a girl plays video games and gets recruited to play special games, which of course (as in "Ender's Game") have real-world effects. I liked it, though not as much as many other readers did, I don't think.
I get a card from the excellent folks at Wormhole books twice a year, with a short-short printed on it: this year the stories were "In the Memory of Dogs" by John Kennedy and "The Letter Before Christmas" by Edward Bryant -- the Bryant in particular was nasty fun.
The New York Times featured an enjoyable short story by Susanna Clark, "Antickes and Frets". Amazon.com featured a strong story in the same universe as his novel Light: "tourism" by M. John Harrison. The Socialist Review featured a satiric Christmas story by China Miéville, "'Tis the Season", which was OK but a bit thuddingly obvious at times. The IEEE Spectrum website had a decent Vernor Vinge story, "Synthetic Serendipity". And Nalo Hopkinson had a seasonal story on her website, along with a plea for hurricane relief donations -- "A Young Candy Daughter". And finally, Warren Ellis published a pile of short-shorts on his blog, "Die Puny Humans", which were of uneven quality, but as Richard Kadrey and Cory Doctorow were among the contributors I thought it worth a look.
