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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Oceans of the Mind, 2005
Oceans of the Mind is a quarterly magazine, distributed by email (or by password protected access to a file on their website), that has a strongly SFnal focus. It is formatted in .pdf. Editor/publisher Richard Freeborn has managed a very regular quarterly schedule through 17 issues to date. This year Richard only manage 3 issues. The fourth was slightly delayed, to January 2006, due to hurricane effects. (The magazine is based in Florida.) Each issue has a theme: this year's were Military, Sports, and Mystery. (Sometimes the themes bleed a bit: Catherine Shaffer and Jim C. Hines's "OM+" from the Mystery Issue could easily have been Sports, and Cherith Baldry's "Alekhine's Defense", from Sports, could have fit into Mystery.)
The three issues include 16 stories, 5 novelettes and 11 shorts (two of them "short-shorts"), for about 93,000 words of fiction.
Among the novelettes, I enjoyed David Drake's "A Death in Peacetime", a typically cynical Hammer's Slammer's story; and Ryck Neube's "Mall Warriors", in which the "Mall" is a clearinghouse on another planet, where prospects sell "artifacts" they've uncovered. Among the short stories, I liked Cherith Baldry's "The Diamond Star", a colorful detective story about the mysterious criminal the White Rose, set in an odd future in which England seems to have returned to Victorian, or at least Edwardian, social structures. (Baldry is an Oceans regular, and I always enjoy her work.) Terry Bramlett's "Retirement" is a nice short piece about future baseball players. (I just want to know if the character "Joe" is McCarthy or Torre!)
This remains an enjoyable magazine with a science-fictional focus I appreciate. This year I don't think the high points were quite as good as in some previous years, but the general level of fiction was fine.
