Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Anthologies, 2005
In 2005 I read 30 different original anthologies. (Some had a couple of reprint stories, and one was more than half reprint, but had several new stories.) This is four less than I read last year. I'm feeling just a bit guilty about that, but I'll get over it. I skipped two of the DAW anthologies on the grounds that they looked hopeless. I skipped a couple of smaller press anthologies that really didn't look very interesting. And I haven't seen a couple of books that may well be worth my time (Strange Pleasures 3, for one, and The Elastic Book of Numbers for another).
As usual, for manageability I'll divide them into smaller chunks which I will consider in separate posts. These "chunks" are ad hoc, devised by me, and any individual anthology might of course fit better, or at any rate just as well, into a different chunk. For those who think it matters, some of these books included some stories that were not SF (nor fantasy nor horror) by any definition: I haven't bothered to separate these from the rest.
Totals first: 30 books, 428 stories (20 novellas, 86 novelettes, 333 short stories (24 "short-shorts")), somewhat over 2.8 million words.
1. DAW
This includes 10 mass market paperbacks in what is sometimes called DAW's "monthly magazine". That's all the original DAW anthologies save two. Those I skipped were Magic Tails -- I simply couldn't imagine reading another goshdarned BOOK full of cat stories (there are some good cat stories but way too many sickening ones) -- and a Mercedes Lackey book full of other writers working in her Valdemar series -- I simply couldn't imagine reading a whole bunch of stories based on Lackey's work.
The books I did read:
Constellations, edited by Peter Crowther;
Renaissance Faire, edited by Andre Norton and Jean Rabe;
I, Alien, edited by Mike Resnick;
Maiden, Matron, Crone, edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin H. Greenberg;
Gateways, edited by Martin H. Greenberg;
Women of War, edited by Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter;
You Bet Your Planet, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koren;
In the Shadow of Evil, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers;
All Hell Breaking Loose, edited by Martin H. Greenberg;
Time After Time, edited by Denise Little.
I note that there was no Sword And Sorceress book -- I'm not sure what the long term status of that project is.
Subtotals: 10 books, 161 new stories (1 novella, 27 novelettes, 133 short stories (2 short-shorts)), about 960,000 words of new fiction.
2. Baen anthologies
I read two anthologies from Baen Books this year:
Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Far Futures, edited by T.K.F. Weisskopf;
The Enchanter Completes, edited by Harry Turtledove.
Subtotals: 2 books, 19 new stories and 1 reprint (3 novellas, 10 novelettes, 6 short stories (one a short-short, as was the reprint)), for 214,000 words of new fiction.
3. Wheatland Press anthologies
This active small press published three good anthologies in 2005: the fifth number of the ongoing Polyphony series, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake; The Nine Muses, edited by Forrest Aguirre and Deborah Layne; and TEL:Stories, edited by Jay Lake.
Subtotals: 3 books, 70 stories (no novellas, 5 novelettes, 65 short stories (11 short-shorts)), a total of about 270,000 words.
4. SFBC anthologies
One of the heartening new (or sort of new) ventures in the SF short fiction field is the Science Fiction Book Club's program of original anthologies, usually of long novelettes or novellas. This year they published two (with one more just barely slipping into January 2006). These were The Fair Folk, edited by Marvin Kaye; and Down These Dark Spaceways, edited by Mike Resnick.
Subtotals: 12 stories (10 novellas, 2 novelettes), about 319,000 words.
5. Small Press anthologies
The Wheatland books made their way out of this category this year. Of those remaining, two are very short, sort of chapbooks (though perfect bound and very nice looking). (These are Jabberwocky and Rabid Transit: Menagerie.)
The books:
Adventure, Volume 1, edited by Chris Roberson;
Jabberwocky, edited by Sean Wallace;
Rabid Transit: Menagerie, edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan De Niro, and Kristin Livdahl;
Future Washington, edited by Ernest Lilley;
New Wave of Speculative Fiction: The What-If Factor, edited by Sean Wright.
Subtotals: 60 stories total: no novellas, 12 novelettes, 48 short stories (4 of them "short-shorts"), for a total of about 323,000 words total.
6. From Other Countries
Two anthologies were explicitly devoted to writers from a single country (and here I confess that there were two Australian anthologies I might have included here except I didn't read them!):
Tesseracts Nine, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman [Canada];
Nova Scotia, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson [Scotland].
Subtotals: 2 books, 42 stories total (2 novellas, 7 novelettes, 35 short stories (5 short-shorts), about 240,000 words of new fiction.
7. YA anthologies
This "category" only includes one book this year, but it seems a useful category, and it seems that in other years there have been many more. The book was the McSweeney's collection Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Ma bye, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures From the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and one Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out, edited by Ted Thompson with Eli Horowitz. It's a very short anthology (arguably closer to "middle-grade" than YA), with 8 original stories (plus two reprints and a comic), about 30,000 words of new fiction. (All the stories were short stories, one a short-short.)
8. Fantasy anthologies
This largish category includes anthologies that seemed explicitly devoted to fantasy (sometimes horror or "dark fantasy", in one case "sword and sorcery", but always fantasy as opposed to science fiction). I put 5 books in this category:
Fantastic Companions, edited by Julie E. Czerneda;
Lords of Swords, edited by Daniel R. Blackston;
Winter Moon, no editor listed;
Outsiders, edited by Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick;
The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley.
As I did last year with another of Ashley's anthologies, I note that the "Mammoth" book is indeed very large, and it is predominantly composed of reprints. But it does include 9 originals, more than 50,000 words of fiction, so it's certainly a significant source of new stuff.
Subtotals: 65 stories (4 novellas, 23 novelettes, 38 short stories (no short-shorts)), about 485,000 words of new fiction.
