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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Fantasy Magazine, 2005
Fantasy is a new venture from Prime Books (Wildside Press), edited by Sean Wallace. I am a contributor of book reviews to the magazine, so (as with Black Gate) keep in mind that I do have an emotional stake in the success of the magazine. That said, I do think that this first issue is pretty strong work -- if there is a weakness it is in a certain narrowness of range. Which is to say: I wouldn't mind some more traditional fantasy mixed in. What the heck: some Sword and Sorcery*! But that's asking the magazine to be something it is not: what it is, it manages to be quite successfully. Put another way, it's absolutely chock full (almost to the point of being a Who's Who) of writers Lois Tilton would call "Hot Now Things".
There are 15 stories in the single issue that appeared in 2005, all short, one a short-short by my definition. A total of about 62,000 words. One of the stories is a reprint (Holly Phillips's "Summer Ice", from her 2005 collection _In the Palace of Repose_), so about 55,000 words of new fiction.
Most of the fiction is at least pretty good. The best include "The Finer Points of Destruction", by Richard Parks, one of his lovely sensible quiet pieces, in which a decent but slightly off track ordinary man, missing his wife who has left him, gets set straight by an encounter with the Goddess Kali (or Goddess Aspect Kali) and the God Shiva. Also, "Tear Her Standard Down", by Megan Messinger, in which a young man of somewhat ambiguous gender travels to fairy to try to recover the child of a woman friend of his, and ends up with a bit more than he bargained for -- but perhaps just what he needs. Also Sonya Taaffe's "The Sense of Spirals", a fairly brief description of a very odd city, an always changing city, seen through the eyes of a pair of twins. And there is fine work from Tim Pratt, Vera Nazarian, Margaret Ronald, Jeffrey Ford, a novel excerpt from Jeff VanderMeer, and much more.
(*I should concede that a couple of the stories qualify as at least tangentially Sword and Sorcery. But I think you know what I meant!)
