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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Oceans of the Mind, 2004
Oceans of the Mind is a quarterly magazine, distributed by email (or by password protected access to a file on their website), that has a strongly SFnal focus. It is formatted in .pdf. Editor/publisher Richard Freeborn has managed a very regular quarterly schedule through 14 issues to date. Each issue has a theme: this year's were Colonies, Spiritual, Mysteries, and Editor's Choice (i.e. unthemed!). The four issues included a total of 35 stories, 7 of them novelettes, the others short stories. About 208,000 words total, a significant jump. (The average short story was 5200 words, the average novelette 8900 words.)
I thought the best novelette was "Star Garden", by Brenda Cooper, from the Spring issue, about a long-established "colony" huddling around their downed starship, and the inevitable push by some to try to truly inhabit the planet. Other good novelettes came from Paul Marlowe, Ian Creasey, and Mark Tiedemann.
Among the short stories, I was impressed by Greg Beatty's "Parakeets and PBJs" (Fall), in which an online discussion about creationism gives rise to some neat paranoid speculation. Also, Robin Jensen's "Surely the Clouds Would Come" (Winter) does a good job portraying some alien intelligences -- living precariously on an icy cliff. Mike Moscoe's "A Bad Day All Around" (Summer) has the man in control at a missile defense station forced to decide to shoot down a curious incoming object -- only to regret his decision ... And there is a welcome Jokka story from M. C. A. Hogarth in the Spring issue, "We Defy Old Stars". Other nice stories came from Beatty (again), K. D. Wentworth, Cherith Baldry, Gregory Benford, and Scott W. Carter.
This remains a pretty strong magazine, at the level of the better semi-pro publications, with a welcome (to me) emphasis on science fiction. (Not that I mind fantasy or slipstream, but that we seem to get so much of that at other places -- nice to have a couple of places devoted to the straight stuff.)
