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Summary: Tales of the Unanticipated, 2005
Tales of the Unanticipated is a very nicely produced and generously sized magazine, that now officially calls itself an anthology. It looks just the same as ever, though. As a yearly magazine, calling it anthology does make sense, but I still think of it as a magazine.
This year's issue, #26, dated October 2005-July 2006, featured 20 stories, 3 of them novelettes, 17 short stories (one a short-short), for a total of a bit over 80,000 words of fiction (pretty much as usual). One story, Stephen Dedman's novelette "Mortal Nature", was a reprint from the Australian magazine Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. The 19 new stories totaled about 74000 words. TOTU also publishes a lot of poetry, some quite good.
Both new novelettes are decent, neither really thrilled me. Naomi Kritzer and Lyda Morehouse's "The Long Walk" is about a powerful mage who has been ghettoized with the other magi since a war ended (they are too dangerous to associate with regular citizens). An old lover entices him into a twisty plot, allegedly to free the magi, but ... Patricia Russo's "Redemption" is a very strange piece about a pizza delivery man who promises to help free three odd women (who seem to resemble the Fates) from a terrible imprisonment.
My favorite short stories: Judy Klass's cynical "Boywave", about a future oversupplied with males; David D. Levine's whimsical "A Book is a Journey", about really getting lost in books; and Paul E. Martens's moving "Piper", about a colony world in which dreaming of space travel is forbidden. There was also good work from S. N. Arly, Jennifer Pelland, and Sarah Monette.
