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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Ideomancer, 2005
Last year Ideomancer transitioned to quarterly publication from monthly. It maintained the quarterly schedule in 2005. The four issues featured 14 new stories (plus two "Classic Reprints", a return to the magazine practice of its first couple of years of publishing a piece of proto-SF each issue). The new stories were all short, 5 "short-short" by my definition. About 40,000 words of new fiction.
My favorite story, I think, was "Whale Falls" by Steven Mohan, Jr. This longish SF story is about a woman scientist who has been adapted to survive the deep ocean without special equipment. But her research project is canceled. She flees and spends years in the deeps, continuing to study that unique ecology, until her old colleagues find her and try to lure her back. The story is intimately and believably about our decaying environment, and how even the deepest oceans are not unaffected.
Other good stories came from Yoon Ha Lee ("The Sun's Kiss"), Tom Doyle ("Inversions"), and Jennifer de Guzman ("Like the Cold if You Were Dead"). I also liked one of the classics in particular, Elia W. Pettie's "The Grammatical Ghost", from 1898.
