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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: The Third Alternative, 2005
In a sense this is the last year for The Third Alternative, but it is not really dying. Instead it is changing its name to Black Static. This is intended to reflect a greater focus on horror/dark fantasy -- with the SF Andy Cox buys now going to sister publication Interzone. I can see the point, but I admit I'd prefer that the name stayed the same. For continuity if nothing else. But I have to concede that Andy knows his product and his audience.
TTA has been a quarterly magazine, but this year only two issues appeared. I can only assume that the focus was on getting Interzone fully up and running. At any rate, I saw no issues of Black Static. I did see numbers 41 and 42 of The Third Alternative, dated Spring and Summer. There were 13 stories, 3 novelettes and 10 shorts, for some 80,000 words of fiction.
The two novelettes from the Summer issue were my favorite TTA pieces this year. Paul Meloy's "Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow", a decidedly weird (even "New Weird"), arguably science-fictional, story about, oh, Autoscopes and a special child and ... but I won't try to describe it: it's a perfect Third Alternative story, mixing black humour, bleak English landscapes, and wild ideas very nicely. Douglas Lain's "The Word 'Mermaid' Written on an Index Card" is a moving story about a sad young man dealing with his own depression, the death of his father, and his attraction to a curious young woman who might be a mermaid.
Among the short stories I liked Scott Nicholson's blackly funny story about an undertake, "In the Family"; Martin Simpson's story of an assassin, "The Sixteenth Man I Killed"; and a good, truly disquieting, vampire story from Elizabeth Bear, "House of the Rising Sun". There was also fine work from Patrick Samphire, Jason Erik Lundberg, and Nathan Ballingrud.
