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Summary: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, 2005
The Australian magazine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine put out 6 more issues, maintaining a bimonthly schedule, though my copy of the last 2005 issue, November/December, didn't arrive until January. The six issues I am treating here begin with #16, December 2004-January 2005, and run through #21, October-November 2005. These issues included 60 stories. There were 2 novellas, 9 novelettes, and 49 short stories (9 of the latter being "short-shorts"), a total of some 284,000 words of fiction, almost exactly the same as last year.
(I will note that word counting is very difficult for this magazine, as they play many tricks with font sizes and line spacing. So my category counts, and total word count, certainly could be off by a bit.)
Novellas
Both novellas this year were fairly enjoyable, though neither was brilliant. Douglas A. Van Belle's "A Small Blue Planet for the Pleasantly Insane" makes a fairly standard set of jokes about an alien's misunderstanding of human culture -- nothing much new but pleasant enough. "The Red Priest's Homecoming" by Dirk Flinthart is colorful and enjoyable in an unpretentious way, a story of the return of the rightful heir to a sinister family in 14th Century Venice.
Novelettes
There were three particularly strong novelettes this year. Lyn Triffit's "The Memory of Breathing" may be the best, about executed criminals who have been reanimated to provide labor as restitution. Another story about dead people lingering is "Elena's Seclusion", by Linda Fazio Theys, in which a pathologically shy woman refuses to proceed to the underworld after her death. Stephen Dedman's "Static Song" (which at an estimated 7600 words might be miscategorized) is an interesting story about observing the past through the consciousness of historical figures -- but only mentally disturbed people. I almost really liked Jennifer Pelland's "MarsSickGirl", about a Martian living on Callisto, who foments a revolution, via recorded dreams, against the oppressive Earthers and there insistence upon Earth gravity, but the promising beginning and intriguing setup were fumbled in a flat, pat, implausible ending.
Short Stories
I wasn't quite as impressed with the short stories as with the novelettes. Still, there was good work from Jay Lake ("Many-splendored"), Will McIntosh ("Under the Boardwalk"), Ian Nichols ("The Chill of Eternity"), Jason Ridler ("Disposable Heroes"), and Tansy Rayner Roberts ("Delta Void and the Stray God").
