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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Postscripts, 2004
PS Publishing, known for several years for outstanding novella length books, and a few novels and collections, this year started a new magazine, Postscripts. The magazine is a very attractive product, with about 60,000 words of fiction per issue, nice covers, occasional interior art, strong production standards. They are planning a quarterly schedule for now -- this year two issues appeared. Peter Crowther is the editor and publisher, and my Locus colleague Nick Gevers is the assistant editor.
The two issues contained a little over 120,000 words of fiction, with one very short reprint, so that the total for original fiction was right at 120,000. There were four novelettes and 20 short stories (19 originals, 2 of those plus the reprint being short-shorts). (The novelets averaged just over 11,000 words, the short stories almost 4000.)
The novelettes were generally a strong set. Three of them appeared in the second issue (Summer), and they were the strongest three stories in that issue. Rhys Hughes's "The Old House Under the Snow Where Nobody Goes Except You and Me Tonight" is a surreal story about a mysterious house upon a house upon a house ... unpredictable as anything, pure Hughes. Zoran Zivkovic's "Compartments" is also a bit surreal, about a man getting on a train and entering six compartments, meeting different people each time and following the trail, sort of, left by an exotic woman. Brian Stableford's "A Chip Off the Old Block" is clever biotechnological near-future SF, with more of a focus on the legal and commercial aspects of patented genes than on the specific technological benefits. From #1, Stephen Gallagher's "Restraint" is solid horror about a divorced woman and her son fleeing a menacing car that looks like her husbands.
Of the short stories, my favorite came from the debut issue (Spring). This was Jay Lake's "The Rose Egg", about a gangster and the naive genius working for him, and a very unusual smart graffiti system. I also like Gene Wolfe's "Prize Crew" (Spring), first rate SF horror about a mysteriously abandoned enemy starship which is unwisely taken back to Earth. There was also interesting work from Mike Resnick and Robert Sheckley, Jeff VanderMeer, Peter F. Hamilton, and Eric Brown.
A promising beginning for what I hope will be a successful new British source of SF.
