Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: SFBC anthologies, 2005
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.
I thought the better of these books was The Fair Folk. It includes a very fine Diogenes Club story from Kim Newman, nearly novel length, "The Gypsies in the Wood", about a couple of children who disappear in late 19th Century England, only to return much changed. One, oddly aged, becomes an illustrator of curious fairy scenes -- the other doesn't seem to age at all. What's going on is obvious, but it's a nice story with engaging leads. I also liked "The Kelpie", a very long novelette (17300 words by my count), by Patricia McKillip, set in what seemed to be the same quasi-Pre-Raphaelite milieu as her 2004 novella "The Gorgon in the Cupboard", about a sort of love triangle involving a successful young painter, an even more successful painter, and an aspiring young woman painter -- and, eventually, a kelpie. And Tanith Lee's "UOUS" is a strong dark story about a disaffected young girl and bad fairies.
Down These Dark Spaceways includes entertaining but not brilliant stories by Robert Sawyer ("Identity Theft") and Robert Reed ("Camouflage"), as well as a fully novel-length story (42,000 words by my count) by David Gerrold, "In the Quake Zone", that has received some praise but that I thought an unconvincing mess.
