Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Anthologies From Other Countries, 2005
Two anthologies were explicitly devoted to writers from a single country (and here I confess that there were two Australian anthologies I might have included here except I didn't read them!):
Tesseracts Nine, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman [Canada];
Nova Scotia, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson [Scotland].
Subtotals: 2 books, 42 stories total (2 novellas, 7 novelettes, 35 short stories (5 short-shorts), about 240,000 words of new fiction.
Both of the novellas were from Tesseracts, and I preferred Élisabeth Vonarburg's tense multiple universe tale "See Kathryn Run". Of the novelettes, two more from Tesseracts were my favorites: René Beaulieu's curiously old-fashioned story "Mirrors", about a couple stranded on a distant planet; and Sarah Totton's "Jimmy Away to Me", about a young woman dealing with the suicide of a close friend, and with her memories of a different world she had shown him.
There were good short stories in Nova Scotia from Ken MacLeod ("A Case of Consilience", about an alien planet and a very different sort of communication, and the way a priest gets involved), and Charles Stross's "Snowball's Chance", a rather nasty little story about a nasty man and his deal with the devil. There was also a nice set of short-shorts from Ron Butlin ("Five Fantastic Fictions") and a neat post-human story from Hannu Ramajieni, "Deus et Homine". From Tesseracts, Claude Lalumière's "Being Here" is a striking story of an epidemic in which people become essentially disembodied. Jerome Stueart's "Lemmings in the Third Year" is a funny piece about a researcher marooned among talking animals. And Candas Jane Dorsey's takes a sardonic but not bitter look at a woman, her mother, and Mother Teresa, and the burden -- or boon -- of taking responsibility for those less fortunate, in "Mom and Mother Teresa".
