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Summary: The Third Alternative, 2004
The Third Alternative is a quarterly magazine, published and edited by Andy Cox. Andy has this past year also acquired Interzone. Last year I wrote of TTA: "The style remains unchanged -- a heavy dose of dark fantasy with lots of atmosphere". I could say the same thing this year -- I think TTA has established and maintained a style or mode as consistently as any magazine this side of Analog. It does seem to consider itself -- or to be considered -- something of the flagship magazine of the quasi-movement sometimes called "the New Weird". It remains a beautiful magazine, with generally strong fiction, of which my only complaint is that the range of mood and subject matter is a bit narrow. (And I would guess likely to get if anything narrower, if Interzone suctions off the more science-fiction oriented stories.) British SF has long had a reputation for gloominess -- suffice it to say that The Third Alternative does not do anything to dispel that reputation!
This year TTA published 25 stories, the same total as each of the past two years. (Although I emphasize as ever that The Third Alternative is not an easy magazine for which to do word counts.) I counted seven novelettes and 18 shorts, for a total of some 164,000 words of fiction, 8,000 words more than last year. (Again I caveat that there were a few stories in the 7300-7700 word range -- certainly the odd novelette might have been a short story or vice versa. The average length of the 7 novelettes was about 9500 words, of the 18 short stories, about 5400.
I thought the best novelette was John Grant's "Has Anyone Hear Seen Kristie?" (Summer), a lovely erotically-charged piece about a man mourning his wife, who meets an intriguing woman named Kristie at the Edinburgh Festival. I also liked Jay Lake's "Daddy's Caliban" (Fall), about two boys -- the protagonist and his curious, sometimes despised, "brother" -- who try to cross the river from their unusual factory town to a sort of "promised land". Also strong is Jay Caselberg's "Iridescence" (Spring), set in a floating city that seemed to me to resemble New York (possibly for no good reason), where every so often someone would be tempted to take the Long Walk -- off the edge. And Tim Pratt's "Terrible Ones" (Spring) is an effective depiction of the Furies in present day San Francisco.
Among the short stories, Tim Lees's "Relics" (Spring), is a strong moody story about a young man visiting a coastal town near a wrecked alien spaceship. Joe Hill's "The Black Phone" (Fall) is a good traditional horror story about a boy kidnapped by a John Gacy-like villain. Christopher Barzak's "A Resurrection Artist" (Fall) is a powerful piece about a man who can resurrect himself from the dead, and his sister who sees a commercial opportunity in this. Paul Meloy's "Black Static" (Winter) begins very strangely, with a man visiting a seemingly deserted town, and a girl descending to the same town via balloon -- all resolving rather more ordinarily, but sadly. I also liked stories from Vandana Singh, Eugie Foster, Damian Kilby, Daniel Kaysen, Gavin Grant, and Mike O'Driscoll.
