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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Wheatland Press anthologies, 2005
This active small press published three good anthologies in 2005: the fifth number of the ongoing Polyphony series, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake; The Nine Muses, edited by Forrest Aguirre and Deborah Layne; and TEL:Stories, edited by Jay Lake.
Subtotals: 3 books, 70 stories (no novellas, 5 novelettes, 65 short stories (11 short-shorts)), a total of about 270,000 words.
Going in I expected to like the reliable continuing anthology Polyphony best of these, but in fact my favorite was the "experimental" anthology, TEL:Stories. I found Polyphony 5 a mild disappointment relative to its established standards: which is not to say that it was bad, but that it wasn't as good as I hoped, particularly at the top end. (I.e., there were a lot of pretty good stories, but not really any wonderful stories.) TEL, by contrast, had some, well, let's just call them experiments that were a success by means of negative results, but also some lovely stuff -- and it was generally more interesting, even when not successful.
The best of the novelettes was certainly Greer Gilman's "Jack Daw's Pack" (TEL:Stories), but that was a reprint. Of the originals, my favorite was "Ithrulene", by Alexander Lamb (Polyphony), about a husband trying to rescue a woman kidnapped by terrorists from a very tall city/building in a strangely different world. There was also good work by Sally Carteret, and by the team of Michael Jasper, Tim Pratt, and Greg van Eekhout.
Of the short stories, my favorite was Gregory Feeley's "Fancy Bread" (TEL:Stories), which follows the later career of Jack (of the Beanstalk -- or a version thereof) and his struggle for bread, and in so doing comments cogently on, pretty much, economics. From Polyphony, I particularly liked the late d. g. k. goldberg's "A Love for All Time", a science fiction story happily enough, pretty funny, about intersecting timelines and the difficulties of having another version of yourself steal your husband. From The Nine Muses I liked Beth Bernobich's "The Colors of Tomorrow" (borderline novelette length), a Cinderella story; Sarah Totton's "The Teasewater Five", about some unusually lifelike artificial animals, and Kit Reed's "Spies", funny stuff about the Fates in a Southern town, and Victoria Elisabeth Garcia's "Ask for Her Hand", an "introduce the fiancé to my weird family" story. Other good stories fromTEL were Anil Menon's "Love in a Hot Climate", Th. Metzger's "Hex-Ray Hoodoo Rapture", and Ian Creasey's "In Profit and Loss". From Polyphony I should also mention Bruce Holland Rogers's "Story Stories", Jeff VanderMeer's "The Farmer's Cat", and Brendan Connell's "The Tongue".
One disappointment was the lack of novellas. Polyphony in particular is long enough to house a couple of novellas -- I hope they publish more longer stories in the future. And another disappointment, but not a surprise given the stated aims and themes of the anthologies, was a relative dearth of Science Fiction, as opposed to Fantasy or Slipstream.
