Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: The Infinite Matrix, 2005
Infinite Matrix (<http://www.infinitematrix.net/>) published 6 stories in 2005, plus a full-length novel by Richard Kadrey. Alas, the site is closing as of the end of 2005. (The stories will be available for another year or so, unless contractual issues intervene.) Editor Eileen Gunn never really had the financing to keep this going (as she said, it was a cost center not a profit center), but what she did publish was excellent.
This year's stories are all quite good: "Reborn Again" by the late Robert Sheckley, "The Witch's Hand" by Patrick O'Leary, "Matched" by Nisi Shawl, "I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow, "The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club" by Rudy Rucker, and "Why School Busses are Yellow" by James Patrick Kelly. That makes three novelettes and three short stories (one a short-short), about 44,000 words of fiction. My favorite was "I, Robot", indeed, that is one of my favorite stories of the year. This is one of a series of stories Doctorow is planning (so I hear) riffing on SF classics from a contemporary political viewpoint. Besides Asimov's robot stories, this one comments (seems to me) on 1984. It's about a policeman whose wife has defected to the utopian -- and robot-friendly -- Eurasia, leaving him to raise his daughter in repressed and robot-hostile North America, and what happens when his daughter is kidnapped. (The Asimov parallels, it should be clear, are closer to The Caves of Steel than I, Robot itself.)
