Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Amazon Shorts, 2005
Amazon.com started a new program this year. They publish short stories (up to novella length) and essays for download, 49 cents apiece. I read quite a few of these that I considered SF (some I had to go to the Literature and Fiction category to find). I was quite pleased by the overall quality.
I tried to read all the SF short fiction. I skipped a couple that seemed to be novel excerpts, and I also skipped the Jack Dann story, one of his James Dean series, which I find very tiresome. (I truly could not care less than I do about James Dean.)
So I ended up reading 17 SF Amazon shorts. These total just about 100,000 words of fiction. One was a novella, 3 were shortish novelettes, and the remaining 13 short stories (one a short-short).
The novella is R. A. MacAvoy's "The Go-Between", pretty decent reading about a painter of Chinese ancestry, and the trouble he gets into with mob types who are interested in his ne'er do well grandfather. There is a mild fantastical element.
My favorite novelette was "Bit Players", by Esther M. Friesner and Jay Caselberg, about werewolves and rugby. Obviously, it's a comedy, very much in Friesner's familiar mode. Fun.
The best of the short stories is Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer", which is indeed one of the best short stories of the year. It's about an accident at a physics lab that brings a herd of Triceratops to Vermont -- it's also a meditation on time travel, reminiscent somewhat of _Bones of the Earth_ -- quite sweet and thoughtful. There is also good work from Gregory Frost, James Morrow, Walter Jon Williams, Mary Rosenblum, and Edward M. Lerner.
