Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Argosy, 2004
Argosy made an ambitious debut in 2004, publishing two quite beautiful issues, dated January/February and May/June. However, they immediately had distribution problems, due I believe to their unusual format: the magazine and an accompanying novella, bound separately, are packaged in a slipcase. Some bookstores balked at displaying this format, and I believe eventually another version of the magazine was offered. (I have not seen that, though.) The original editor, Lou Anders, left after the second issue. I haven't seen a third issue, but I did see a notice to the effect that the magazine will continue after another format change. I do hope they make it -- it's a great looking product, and they've published some very nice fiction.
The two issues featured 16 stories, 3 novellas, 4 novelettes, and 9 short stories (one a short-short of 200 words). One of the novellas was a reprint. There were a total of over 150,000 words of fiction, just under 130,000 new. (The original novellas averaged a whopping 26,400 words, the novelettes 9300 words, the short stories 4400 words.) The stories are a mixture of genres -- lots of SF and fantasy, but also mystery and mainstream.
The novella in the first issue was Michael Moorcock's "The Adventure of the Texas Twister", which I did not like. It's a satirical look at contemporary American politics, that fails by being silly and obvious rather than imaginative and biting. The novellas in the second issue were by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow: their 2002 Sci Fiction story "Jury Service" paired with its direct sequel "Appeals Court", collectively titled _The Rapture of the Nerds_. "Appeals Court" is pretty fun stuff, with the hero visiting a future US complete with primitive Baptists, petroleum trees, a hypercolony of flesh-eating ants, and another Church promoting lots of sex.
The best of the novelettes was Jeffrey Ford's "A Night at the Tropics", about a cursed chess set and the bully who stumbles into possession of it. (My word count for this story was 7600, so it may not actually be a novelette.) There is also an excellent Carol Emshwiller story, "My General",one of her recent war stories, about a woman assigned a POW from the opposing forces as field labor.
Of the short stories I liked Mike Resnick's "El Presidente" (one of his Lucifer Jones tales), Benjamin Rosenbaum's "The Valley of the Giants", O'Neil de Noux's "Cruelty the Human Heart", and Jeff VanderMeer's "How Benjobi Song Came to Rule in Iphigenia".
