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Summary: Postscripts, 2005
The UK-based magazine Postscripts had a fairly successful second year of publication, putting out 3 fine issues. Peter Crowther is the editor and publisher, and my Locus colleague Nick Gevers is the assistant editor.
The three issues contained just over 150,000 words of fiction. There were 11 novelettes and 11 short stories. (Three of the novelettes and one of the short stories were clustered around the 7500 word borderline, so my numbers could certainly be off a bit.) (The novelettes averaged just over 9,000 words, the short stories just over 4600.)
I liked Joe Hill's novelette "Best New Horror" (Spring) best of all. (This is one of those borderline novelettes -- perhaps it is really a short story.) It's about the editor of a Year's Best Horror anthology who is fascinated by a striking, but very unpleasant, story by an unknown writer, who then tries to track down the writer ... with, of course, less than ideal results. (It is a horror story, after all.) I thought this clearly one of the standout stories of the year, by a writer who may be the standout "new discovery" of the year, though he's not precisely new, he's been publishing since the late '90s. But this year (or perhaps last year) was his breakout year.
Zoran Zivkovic contributed two fine novelettes, each part of an ongoing series. The series, _Four Stories Till the End_, will consist of four stories, each of which also is composed of four smaller stories. This year at Postscripts we saw "The Cell" (Summer) and "The Hospital Room" (Autumn). Each story is about a man in a room, waiting for some sort of "end", who is visited by four people, each of whom tells him a related, strange, story. The stories are funny and philosophical.
Alastair Reynolds's "Zima Blue" (Summer) is another fine novelette (or perhaps a long short story), about a sort of Christo-like future artist, who specializes in huge art constructions with the colour that comes to be called "Zima Blue" an integral component. Eventually we learn who the artist really is, and what "Zima Blue" means to him. Neat stuff, and surprisingly moving.
Among the short stories, the longest (which is to say, it might be a novelette) is also one of the best, another Joe Hill piece, "Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead", a really nice non-SF story about a failed actor meeting an old flame on the set of George Romero's movie _Dawn of the Dead_.
Also, Gene Wolfe's "Comber" is a very cool thing about a city floating on a huge ocean, and how its inhabitants react when it seems headed for collision with another floating city. Stephen Baxter's "A Signal From Earth" is a strong story about a dying race on a curious alien planet.
I also liked stories by Juliet McKenna and Chris Roberson, and the less earnest of Lawrence Person's contributions. And I truly didn't like the Jack Dann stories -- I couldn't care less about James Dean!
