Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Small Press anthologies, 2005
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.
Two of these, as I said, are very brief, looking like chapbooks almost. And I should add that both of those are planned for regular publication -- indeed, Rabid Transit: Menagerie is, I believe, the fourth of its series. Also both of these books have very much a cross-genre, slipstream, "New Weird", sort of feel.
Adventure is also planned for regular publication. It is an attempt at recreating good old fashioned adventure fiction, with literary values. Though not promising to be an SF anthology, all the stories save perhaps one had speculative elements.
Future Washington was put out by the Washington Science Fiction Association, and it features, simply enough, stories set in Washington D. C. in the future.
Finally, New Wave of Speculative Fiction, the What-If Factor is a UK product, featuring stories by very new writers (almost all the names were unfamiliar to me). I must say I found it very disappointing.
There were several strong novelettes, in particular two from Future Washington: Cory Doctorow's "Human Readable", about a quasi-AI network of tiny machines controlling traffic and other things, and the problems arising when it breaks down -- or is manipulated; and Edward M. Lerner's "The Day of the RFIDs", about the sinister loss of privacy resulting from widespread use of radio frequency ID tags. I also liked Rudi Dorneman's "The Sky Green Box", from Rabid Transit: Menagerie, set in a very weird (but apparently SFnal) future, and about a woman who has lost her heart. And from Adventure, I liked Kim Newman's "Richard Riddle, Boy Detective", peripherally a Diogenes Club story, about three children after what they think is a French spy, as well as "The Mad Lands, Part 1: Death Wish", novelette length but apparently just the beginning of a novel, by Lou Anders, a wild "New Weird" Western complete with mechanical horses and a hero saved from the gallows; as well as stories by Kage Baker and Marc Singer. (But not Michael Moorcock's "Dogfight Donovan's Day Off", a
completely awful story, the worst story I've read in some time by an established writer.) And probably the best story in New Wave of Speculative Fiction was a short novelette from Allen Ashley, "Black Forest Manouevers".
Among the short stories, a couple of funny (in one way or another) pieces from Adventure stand out: Mike Resnick's "Island of the Annoyed Souls", a Lucifer Jones story and a takeoff on The Island of Dr. Moreau; and Chris Nakashima-Brown's "Ghulistan Bust-Out", featuring a location scout in Afghanistan. Also from Adventure, John Meaney and Neal Asher have good pieces. From Future Washington, the best of the shorter pieces is James Alan Gardner's "Shopping at the Mall", about a man trying to sell off the remains of Washington D. C. From Jabberwocky I liked Sonya Taaffe's very brief and intense tale of lost love, "Shadowplay"; and Ainsley Dicks's Little Red Riding Hood reimagining, "In Grandmother's House". And the best of the shorter pieces in Rabid Transit: Menagerie is probably Dean Francis Alfar's "Terminos", about a man who buys time.
