Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Strange Horizons, 2005
Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) is in my opinion the best remaining SF fiction webzine with the demise of Sci Fiction. They publish a story a week, mostly new. Most of the stories are short, but the longest range to about 12,000 words. The focus is broad -- lots of "slipstream", but also general fantasy and science fiction.
I counted just about 181,000 words of fiction this year, a little more than 175,000 words of it new. There were a total of 55 new stories, and two reprints. Of the new stories, 5 were novelettes, 50 shorts (16 of those "short-shorts", including 12 in Jenn Reese's monthly series based on the Chinese Zodiac). (It might be noted that one short story came in at 7491 words, thus could easily be called a novelette if you wished.)
As with last year, my favorite novelette was a Gillam Anderson story by Jason Stoddard, "Exception". Anderson, a memory editor, is hired to investigate problems in a virtual reality installation, and has to edit a quite unusual mind. I also liked David Moles's "Planet of the Amazon Women", a challenging and original story set on a planet quarantined because of "Amazon Fever", which kills men. A gay man impersonates a woman to visit the planet, so the story is at one level concerned with gender issues. But more centrally Moles is dealing with philosophical questions about causality. Challenging and original, as I said, very ambitious, but not quite successful. Eliot Fintushel also had an interesting novelette, "Bone Women", a rather agonizing story about the protagonist's trouble with women.
The best short story was by Theodora Goss. "Pip and the Fairies" is about a successful actress whose mother wrote a series of children's books about a little girl travelling to Faerie. The actress, Philippa or Pip, returns to her childhood home after her mother's death to confront memories of poverty, her resentment of her mother, and her strange childhood, which may or may not have inspired her mother's stories. Several other stories also stand out. Douglas Lain's "A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story" is a story of a marriage in trouble and a possible alien invasion -- very simple events as told but strange and moving. Daniel Kaysen's "The Jenna Set" is a smart romantic comedy about a mathematical theory and a futuristic answering machine. I also liked several retold fairy stories: Stephanie Burgis's "Inside the Tower", Merrie Haskell's "Huntswoman", Beth Adele Long's "Rapunzel Dreams of Knives", and Ruth Nestvold's "Happily Ever Awhile". Other strong stories came from Kat Beyer, M. K. Hobson, Leah Bobet, Liz Williams, and Anil Menon.
And I collectively enjoyed Jenn Reese's Chinese Zodiac stories, a varied bunch, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes dark -- good work.
