Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Talebones, 2004
As usual, Talebones published two issues in 2004. I'll repeat what I said last year, as it remains valid: "It continues one of the nicest small press magazines, always good looking, with a nice mix of stories, poems, reviews, and interviews. I could wish for the occasional longer story, but so it always seems to be with smaller press publications. The subtitle is "A Magazine of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy", and in general they stay pretty close to that mix -- most of the fantasies are horror-tinged, not adventure oriented, and there is always some straight SF as well."
This year there were 16 stories, one a novelette, one a short-short, for some 66,000 words of fiction -- quite a bit more than last year. (There was some tinkering with the font size and column layout.)
Best of the year was Paul Melko's "Ten Sigmas" (Summer), one of the better short stories of the year period. This is a neat Many Worlds story about a man who can "share" his mind with instances of himself in "nearby" parallel universes. Other strong stories include "Where is the Line", by David D. Levine (Summer), about an unemployed man learning a lesson from an exotic neighbour woman. Sarah Prineas's "The Dog Prince" (Winter) (set perhaps the same world as her fine recent RoF story "The Chamber of Forgetting), is a good dark story of warring kingdoms and grotesque revenge. The novelette, Tom Piccirrilli's "Jesus Wrestles the Mob to Feed the Homeless" (Winter) is a weird, wild, story of mobsters in the near future, along with a warlike Pope, and some unusual brain implant tech. Stories by Craig English, Devon Monk, Steve Mohan, Jr., and Carrie Vaughn were also fine.
