Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Baen anthologies, 2005
I read two anthologies from Baen Books this year. I suspect there may have been a couple more, but these are the ones I saw:
Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures, edited by T.K.F. Weisskopf;
The Enchanter Completed, edited by Harry Turtledove.
Subtotals: 2 books, 19 new stories and 1 reprint (3 novellas, 10 novelettes, 6 short stories (one a short-short, as was the reprint)), for 214,000 words of new fiction.
Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures is the second in a planned series of original anthologies. However, I talked to Toni Weisskopf at Archon, and she was pessimistic about the future prospects of the series. Too bad -- though I was somewhat disappointed with the first books, I quite enjoyed this second volume. It's full of longer stories, 3 novelettes and 3 novellas. I wouldn't call any of the stories classics, or potential award nominees, but they were all pretty fun. My favorites were two of the novellas, "Botany Bay" by Paul Chaife, a mystery set on a "prison colony" planet; and "Beyond Pluto" by Gregory Benford, about energy beings at the edge of our solar system. I believe the latter is an extract from Benford's 2005 novel _Sunborn_, though I am not sure.
The Enchanter Completed is a tribute anthology for L. Sprague de Camp. I have to say it wasn't really as good as I might have hoped. The best stories were "The Haunted Bicuspid" by Harry Turtledove, a short novelette about a man who gets a tooth from a corpse implanted with unfortunate results; and "The Newcomers" by Poul Anderson, a longish short story, rather cynical, about fairy creatures from Europe transplanted to the New World, with disastrous results.
