Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: New Stories from Collections, 2005
I read a number of original stories in single author collections this past year. I saw a total of 10 collections with original stories -- rather a small number (compare to 19 last year). These were:
Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link
In the Forest of Repose, by Holly Phillips
Gunning for the Buddha, by Michael Jasper
Wasps at the Speed of Sound, by Derryl Murphy
The Engine of Recall, by Karl Schroeder
Counting on Wildflowers, by Kim Antieau
The Traveling Tide, by Rosaleen Love
Singing Innocence and Experience, by Sonya Taaffe
The Sound of Angels, by Lisa Silverthorne
Never Seen by Waking Eyes, by Stephen Dedman
These 10 books included 7 original novelettes and 18 original short stories, for some 140,000 words of new fiction. (I omit Link's "Magic for Beginners", a novella which appeared more or less simultaneously in the collection and in F&SF, and which I have already counted as an F&SF story.)
Of the novelettes my favorite story was "The Other Grace", by Holly Phillips, about an amnesiac girl who doesn't recognize her previous self. (But it's probably not really SF.) I also liked Link's "Some Zombie Contingency Plans", Taaffe's "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl", and Schroeder's "Alexander's Road".
Of the short stories I preferred Link's "The Great Divorce", about relationship counseling between dead people and alive people, and Phillips's "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun", about a man coming home to confront a dark secret of his grandfather's. Other good ones include Taaffe's "Time May Be" and Phillips's "Summer Ice".
