Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: On Spec, 2004
It has become traditional, I suppose, for the Winter issue of On Spec not to come out until the year following its date. Indeed this year the Fall 2004 issue was mailed, apparently, only barely in Fall -- in late December at any rate. It is a small thing, to be sure, but I would change the date of the Winter issue, or perhaps simply skip an issue. It must be said that over all, through 58 issues to date, On Spec has been quite a regular quarterly publication, particularly in recent years. And 58 issues is an awfully good total for a fairly small press magazine. At any rate, as the Winter 2003 issue did not appear until 2004, and the Winter 2004 issue does not seem likely to come out for some time, I include the four issues from Winter 2003 through Fall 2004 in this 2004 summary.
These four issues had 46 stories, 4 of them novelettes. The total word count was right at 170,000, very similar to last year's count. The story count is much higher than last year, mainly due to a whole bunch of very short stories by Catherine MacLeod, 11 in all. (There were two more stories under 500 words, for a total of 13 short-shorts.) (One of MacLeod's stories, "Judgement", was listed in the TOC as a poem, but it is unmistakably a short story, albeit very short.)
The best stories this year included A. Merry Arruin's "The Black Man" (Winter 2003), a sardonic story about a gated community inviting a black resident in to increase their diversity -- with appropriate results. Mike Lewis's "First Through the Post" (Winter 2003) uses a high-tech mailing system in intriguing ways. Michael Brockington's "Jumpstart Heart" (Spring) is a very odd story about a bunch of friends and a strange doctor and marital problems and weird surgery -- hard to really describe. But pretty good. "Alabaster" by Melissa Hardy (Summer) is a moving fantasy about a sculptor who falls in love with his subject, a dying young woman, and tries to save her with the help of a witch. "The Dead Boy" by Holly Phillips (Summer) is a strong crime story about a psychic and a troubled ex-policeman. Kristopher Horton (no relation) contributes "Smart Card" (Fall), a cute story about a credit card with perhaps too much artificial intelligence. I also liked quite a few of MacLeod's flash pieces. And stories by Jeffrey D. Johnson, Jack Skillingstead, Jean-Claude Dunyach, and Phillip Raines and Harvey Welles were also worthwhile.
Finally, I'd like to mention the cover art, consistently a strong part of On Spec. This year I thought the covers particularly good, perhaps most notably Peter Thorpe's rocket painting for the Fall issue.
