Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Strange Horizons, 2004
Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) remains one of the best and most consistent sources of SF online. They publish a story a week, mostly new. Most of the stories are short, but the longest range to about 12,000 words. The focus is broad -- lots of "slipstream", but also general fantasy and science fiction.
I counted just about 188,000 words of new fiction this year, very similar to the amounts in past years. There were a total of 47 new stories, and three reprints. Of the new stories, 4 were novelettes, 43 shorts (4 of those "short-shorts"). (The average length of a novelette was 10,000 words, of a short story, 3400.)
My favorite novelettes were two linked stories by Jason Stoddard, "Unfinished" and "Revision". These both dealt with Gillam Anderson, an "editor". An "editor" in these stories edits memories, particularly the memories of long-lived people. The first story deals with Anderson's first important assignment. The second, and better, deals with the repercussions of some editing Anderson did, against his better instincts, to a lover, and his subsequent retirement, only to be lured back to try to fix the problems caused by excessive editing of the head of a starship development program. The stories treat quite interestingly with the intersection of memory and personality.
I liked several short stories quite a bit. Eliot Fintushel's "Women are Ugly" is an affecting story of a superman named Seymour who is convinced women aren't worthy of him. Daniel Starr's "Why I Am Not Gorilla Girl" is a madcap satire (with a solid SFnal core) of a sort of Paris Hilton wannabe who becomes unwittingly a heroine for enhanced gorillas. Barth Anderson's "Alone in the House of Mims" tells of a man struggling to keep up with a troupe of brilliant actors -- and maybe something different. Tom Doyle's "Crossing Borders" is an intelligent and transgressive story of a woman employed as a whore/spy for an ambiguous employer in a cynically portrayed future galactic polity. Liz Williams's "The Pale" is a selkie story with an SFnal kick. John Aegard's "The Great Old Pumpkin" is a Peanuts/Lovecraft crossover -- very neatly done. Vandana Singh's "Three Tales from Sky River" is three short fables of people (or aliens): real SF, but effectively redone as myth. There was also strong work by Chris Nakashima-Brown, Tom Doyle (again), Leslie What, Ken Liu, Michael Stanfield, Alan De Niro, and Paul Melko.
