Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Some Online Sources of Fiction, 2005
Now to a variety of SF-oriented sites that occasionally publish fiction.
1. infinity plus (<http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/index.htm>)
infinity plus has been around for several years. It's an outstanding general interest SF site, maintained by Keith Brooke with the help of Nick Gevers and Paul Barnett. It features plenty of articles and interviews, and a ton of stories and novel excerpts. Most of the stories are reprints, but very occasionally they publish originals. The main focus seems to be to promote authors' new releases, with lots of novel excerpts and occasionally a story or two from a new collection.
This year I counted 5 new stories, one a novella, the rest short stories (one short-short), totaling some 28,000 words. The authors were Anna Tambour, Beth Webb, Nick Jackson, Guy Hasson, and Zoran Zivkovic. The novella was "Her Destiny", by Hasson, actually a reprint from a magazine aimed at publishing international SF (Hasson is an Israeli). My favorite stories, perhaps predictably, were from the two authors I recognize: Tambour and Zivkovic.
2. SF Crowsnest (<http://www.sfcrowsnest.co.uk/>)
This is a European SF site, edited by Stephen Hunt, somewhat newsy and reviewsy. I saw three short-shorts there, two by Geoff Wilmetts and one by Lori Simpson. They qualify as cute but not particularly memorable -- more or less what you'd expect from short-shorts. I could have missed a story or two along the way.
3. SciFi Dimensions (<http://www.scifidimensions.com/>)
Another newsy site, edited by John C. Snider. There were five new stories here, all short stories, about 18000 words total. I rather liked a story by William Ledbetter, "Ascension Salad", about a man who has lost his lover to digital upload.
4. The Agony Column (<http://trashotron.com/agony/>)
This is Rick Kleffel's site, another newsy/reviewsy thing, pretty interesting mostly for Rick's reviews. He publishes very occasional fiction -- one story this year, "Botticelli" by Elizabeth Bear (3900 words) -- a good story.
5. From the Asylum (<http://www.fromtheasylum.com/>)
A fiction/poetry site. They published 29 stories last year. I admit I only read one, "Uncle Plum's Lunar Expedition", a 10,000 word novelette by Paul E. Martens. This is a P. G. Wodehouse pastiche, featuring Wodehouse himself as a character, traveling to the Moon to help his nephew out of a romantic tangle. It's funny enough, pretty entertaining, though, not I hope surprisingly, not a patch on Wodehouse.
