Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Asimov's, 2004
Asimov's published 82 stories in 2003. Only 9 were novellas, 29 were novelettes, and 44 were short-stories, three of the latter being arguably "short-shorts" (under 1500 words). This was about 725,000 words of fiction. (Significantly less fiction than the past two years.)
The obligatory note about word counts, and story counts by category. I do a word count on every story, and I use a standard "words/page" number that I've figured out for Asimov's. This number is based on counting characters (including spaces) per line for a few lines, averaging the total, and dividing by 6 to get words per line, then multiplying by the number of lines per page. I've used this method for years, and I believe it works pretty reliably. It's also an old industry standard, designed to measure how much space a story will occupy in a magazine, and thus to normalize between stories with lots of long words, and stories with lots of dialogue, and such like. I do similar word counts for other magazines and for books. For electronic sources, I use the word counter in Word or TextPad -- which probably produces different results.
My word counts, thus, may differ from others'. And they may differ from the categorization in the TOC of a given publication. I do think my counts are pretty accurate and consistent for print publications. (With caveats for some more difficult to count sources -- Realms of Fantasy, for example, plays tricks with font size and borders that make them hard to count. Same for Andy Cox's magazine. And some magazines use ragged right margins, which are also really hard to estimate.)
Novellas
Asimov's always publishes lots of novellas, which is one thing I really like about the magazine. For some reason, this year they published fewer than in recent years, though still a respectable total.
My favorite novella this year at Asimov's was Gregory Feeley's "Arabian Wine" (April-May), huge for a novella at over 30,000 words. (Greg cut it from a short novel to just barely fit Asimov's maximum length.) This is a story about the introduction of coffee to Venice, and the impact of Islam on the West, and perhaps most importantly about the conservatism of entrenched political power. My second favorite novella was Ian McDowell's "Under the Flag of Night" (March), in which the pirate woman Anne Bonney is recruited to help with a scheme to reanimate Blackbeard's head. It's a lovely concoction, complete with clever swordplay, interesting magic, and a logical and satisfying resolution. Third on my list would be James Patrick Kelly's "Men are Trouble" (June), set in a future where aliens have removed all the men, and about a private eye tracking down a disappeared woman.
The other novelettes include Judith Berman's "The Fear Gun", another story of alien invasion, following several POVs in a town that has maintained some autonomy during the crisis -- at a cost. This got a lot of very respectful attention -- I would say that I respected it too but didn't like it as much as many reader. Also there are three entries in Allen Steele's second Coyote series, that concluded this year in Asimov's and (perhaps revised) will be the novel Coyote Rising. I found these enjoyable but not special -- a bit routine, much of the time. R. Garcia y Robertson contributed a fun Space Opera, "Long Journey Home", and the second last of Charles Stross's Accelerando sequence, "Elector", was also an Asimov's novella.
I'm no good at picking the Asimov's poll winners. I was wrong on all three guesses last year -- closest I came was speculating that (though I didn't pick) Lucius Shepard's "Ariel" had a good chance to win in Novella. This year I'm going to guess wildly at the Kelly story, on the grounds that Kelly is more familiar to the readership, that his story is pure SF (while Feeley's is historical fiction, really, and McDowell's is historical fantasy), and that Steele's stories will split the vote. Stross's Accelerando stories are popular -- "Elector" might have a chance, though it was my feeling that it was one of the lesser stories in its sequence.
Novelettes
I had seven novelettes marked with little stars (actually carets) in my spreadsheet. These were Brian Stableford's "Nectar" and Steven Popkes's "This Old Man" from January, Robert Reed's "A Plague of Life" (March), Lois Tilton's "The Gladiator's War: A Dialog" (June), William Barton's "The Gods of a Lesser Creation" (August), David Moles's "The Third Party" (September), and Charles Stross's "Survivor" (October/November).
My first choice is definitely Moles's "The Third Party". My Locus colleague Nick Gevers liked it too, and I was amused that we both, independently, marked it as a story with the feel of a decades-old John Campbell selection. (I thought it like a 50s Astounding story, Nick suggest early 60s Analog.) Two groups of off-planet visitors are vying for economic control of a newly rediscovered planet -- one socialist, one mercantilist. They battle each other, not quite aware until too late that their is a third party involved -- the residents of the planet, who have their own agenda.
The remaining two slots on my readers ballot could really be filled by any of these six stories. I think I will plump for Stross's "Survivor" second, partly on the grounds that it successfully closes one of the most interesting story sequences of recent years. (The nine stories about Manfred Macx and his family and cat, beginning with "Lobsters", have been revised and will be published as a novel, _Accelerando_ -- I believe next year.) In this story, set in a human colony at a brown dwarf star, Stross comes to some interesting conclusions about Galactic society and the pitfalls of the Singularity. And third, for now, is Brian Stableford's "Nectar", set in a future of long-lived people, and featuring quasi-living genetically engineered creations as body art (example -- a living rose growing from a person's body). Though Reed's "A Plague of Life", another story about long-lived people, could also contend.
There were also strong novelettes this year from Paul Melko, Michael Swanwick, Mary Rosenblum, Kage Baker, Tom Purdom, and William Sanders.
My prediction for the Readers' Poll winner is Charles Stross, simply on the basis of the story being the end of the Accelerando sequence.
Short Stories
Four stories vie for the top spot on my list. Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Embracing the New" (January), about an alien who aspires to be a "godcarver" and who tries something new in that religious artform. Eliot Fintushel's "Gwendolyn is Happy to Serve You" (July) is a delightfully gonzo (that is to say, Fintushelian) story about a waitress and a were-moose. Kit Reed's "Yard Sale" (August) is neat horror, about an acquisitive man who won't free his daughters from his obsessions even after death. And Aaron Schutz's "Being With Jimmy" is both disquieting and moving, about a trio of telepaths on an isolated island, and how the elder and younger of them deal with the middle one, abused and abusive Jimmy. Right now I think my ballot will be 1) Schutz, 2) Fintushel, 3) Reed.
There were also strong stories from Maureen F. McHugh, Jack Skillingstead (three! -- with "Transplant" the best), Gene Wolfe, Chris Roberson, and Y. S. Wilce.
As for a Reader's Poll winner -- Mike Resnick might be in with a chance -- he's very popular and he had a couple of OK stories this years.
Other Categories
The Asimov's Readers' Poll also includes Cover Artist and Poem. (No more interior art, alas!) My favorite covers were August (by Donato Giancola, a recent favorite artist of mine), March (by Michael Carroll), and October/November (by Fred Gambino). Poems I liked included Ruth Berman's "TV Tea" (Febuary), G. O. Clark's "Sunday at the Virtual Beach" (March), Laurel Winter's "On Princesses" (April/May), and Bruce Boston's "Heavy Weather" (August). On the whole I would say that Asimov's poems are a bit too joky for my taste.
Things of Little Interest
Playing with my spreadsheet, I came up with some numbers. The wordcount distributions by category: Novellas 191000, Novelettes 325000, Short Stories 208000. That means the average novella was 21200 words long, the average novelette 11200, and the average short story 4700 words.
That doesn't mean much of anything -- I'll probably run the same numbers for some other magazine just for kicks.
