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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Analog, 2005
Analog published 70 stories in 2005. Two were serials, Jack Williamson's "The Stonehenge Gate" and Karl Schroeder's "Sun of Suns" (only the first two parts of the latter0. Of the 68 shorter pieces, 5 were novellas, 23 were novelettes, and 40 were short-stories, 7 of the latter being short-shorts (5 Probability Zero pieces and two more stories of less than 1500 words, my highly unofficial "short-short" limit). This was about 662,000 words of fiction, about 544,000 words of it short fiction. (This was just somewhat less fiction than in 2004, but a bit more short fiction.)
(One story that I have listed as a novelette was called a novella in the magazine, but I have to leave it as a novelette. This is "The Policeman's Daughter", by Wil McCarthy. My word count is less than 15,000 for this story. I've listed a couple of stories that by my count were only a few hundred words away from the "official" category boundary in the category listed in the magazine, as my counts are only estimates. But while I can easily imagine being off by 500 words or even a thousand in my estimates, I can't imagine being off by 2800 words. So I must simply assume that the categorization of "The Policeman's Daughter" as a novella was a mistake. This is fairly significant, as that story is definitely one of the best Analog stories of the year.)
The bottom line is that I think this was the best year for Analog fiction in some time.
Serials
I haven't yet read "Sun of Suns" -- I always wait until all the parts of a serial are on hand before reading it. "The Stonehenge Gate", however, was a terrible disappointment. Part of this was due to an editorial screwup which led to an error-filled preliminary version of the story being printed. But most of that was due to the story being pretty bad.
Novellas
The best novella this year in Analog was the last, Harry Turtledove's "Audubon in Atlantis" (December). This is a strong Alternate History on an ecological subject, with Audubon visiting a mid-Atlantic continent with a much different, but threatened, set of local fauna. I also liked John Barnes's "The Diversification of Its Fancy" (November), the latest of his Thousand Cultures stories, in which Giraut Leones deals with assassination attempts on himself, and more wrenchingly, with a sad discovery about his lover's "health". The main weakpoint of this story is that it is clearly just part of a longer work. The third novella on my ballot will be Richard A. Lovett's "A Few Good Men" (January/February), a nice time travel story.
As to the likely winner, I'm going to go ahead and predict Turtledove, though Michael A. Burstein is perennially a favorite and he had a novella in the magazine this year too.
Novelettes
This was a very good year for novelettes at Analog. My top four are the aforementioned "The Policeman's Daughter", by Wil McCarthy (June); "Company Secrets", by Kyke Kirkland (April); "Netpuppets", by Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross (June); and "Acts of Conscience"(March), by Shane Tourtellotte. McCarthy's story is set in his Queendom of Sol future, and concerns the legal problems that arise when multiple copies of the same person exist. Kirkland's "Company Secrets" wildly extrapolates (in a sort of 50s-Galaxy fashion) corporate and anti-trust law in a story about a reporter digging into a suspicious "merger" of three scientists. The Lovett/Niemann-Ross story neatly extrapolates a Sims-like game and turns a fine moral point. And Tourtellotte's story is a thought-provoking look at using brain "overlays" to alter significant aspects of character, such as political views.
Those may have been the four best, but there were several more quite strong novelettes: Brian Plante's "In the Loop" (July/August), Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine" (September), David Brin's "Mars Opposition" (January/February), Amy Bechtel's "Language Lessons" (October), and Shane Tourtellotte's "Footsteps" (May).
It's very hard to predict a winner here. I'm going to guess "Acts of Conscience", with a nod to Brin and Bechtel as other possibilities.
Short Stories
Several short stories were starred on my list: "Letters of Transit", by Brian Plante (April); "The Inn at Mount Either", by James Van Pelt (May); "Climbing the Blue", by Stephen Baxter (July/August); "Breeding Maze", by Larry Niven (September); "The Doctrine of Noncontact", by Catherine Shaffer (October); and "911-Backup", by Richard A. Lovett (November).
I have the Van Pelt first on my ballot -- a nice story of a hotel in multiple worlds, and the danger of getting lost. Plante's story goes second -- a very effective use of relativistic effects combined with FTL communication and the paradoxes caused by that. And I think the Baxter short goes third on my list -- a sequel of sorts to last year's "Periandry's Quest", looking at the effects on scientific research of his "Old Earth" setting, with time rates changing with altitude.
And my prediction here? I think Van Pelt has a real chance, and maybe Larry Niven, with "Breeding Maze".
Covers
My three favorite covers are January (Vincent Di Fate), September (Jean-Pierre Normand), and November (George Krauter).
