Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Tales of the Unanticipated, 2004
Tales of the Unanticipated is a very nicely produced and generously sized magazine. As editor Eric Heideman notes it is very professionally produced, very nice looking, and it may be the longest running semiprozine (in terms of years) at that level of "professionalism".
This year's issue, #25, dated August 2004 - July 2005, featured 20 stories, all short stories, for a total of 80,400 words of fiction. Two stories were reprints from Australian sources: the 18 new stories totaled about 74000 words. Average length, some 3700 words. Two of the stories were short-shorts (1500 words or less).
The theme was "Strange Romance", and it certainly met that requirement. Stories considered such things as a man having sex with a giant centipede, a zombie seduced by a woman, a woman in love with candle flames, and of course Mr. and Mrs. Brain.
I was pleased to see a story from one of my favorite newer writers, Sarah Monette. "The Green Glass Paperweight" is another of her stories about Kyle Murchison Booth, this one dealing with his childhood and his hated guardians. Not her best, but enjoyable enough. William Mingin has another of his "1000 Deaths" stories, this one about the atonement a fairly ordinary man must perform after death. Patricia S. Bowne contributes another of her magic university stories, "A Ten O'Clock Scholar", in which an anthropologist gets perhaps a little too involved with the unusual society she studies. All of these and several more stories here are just fine (I might also mention stuff by William Laughlin, Judy Klass, Manfred Gabriel, and of course the utterly gonzo "Mr. Brain and the Voting Booth from Outer Space", by Richard Bowes and Ezra Pines) -- but that said, I didn't see any stories here that really thrilled me. For that reason, I rate this issue a bit lower than some of the recent TOTUs.
