From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:41:53 2004 Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 17:39:00 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Summary: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, 2003 Summary: Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, 2003 Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is a pretty new Australian magazine that has put out 9 issues to date, on what seems to be an impressively regular bimonthly schedule. The editorial duties rotate issue to issue among a group of folks who seem to collaborate in various permutations. Some of those involved are Tansy Rayner Roberts, Nigel Read, Terri Sellen, Ben Payne, Sally Beasley, Ian Nichols, and Robbie Matthews -- and I'm sure I've forgotten a few. Matthews is designated Editor-in-Chief. They bill themselves (or they did on #6 and #7) "Australia's PULPIEST Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine", and that signals a certain insouciance about the project. They don't seem to take themselves too seriously. There is a distinct slant towards humourous stories (though by no means all of the stories are humourous), and also a certain fondness for adventure-oriented SF and Fantasy. I've seen the last four issues, #6 through #9, dated April/May 2003 through October/November 2003. Each issue holds about 50,000 words of fiction, as well as occasional poetry, some essays, interviews, reviews, and letters. The four issues I saw had 196,000 words of fiction by my count, though I must emphasize that ASIM is one of the very hardest magazines for which to do word counting (they fiddle with both font size and spacing). I counted 6 novelettes (one a reprint), and 45 short stories, but a couple of novelettes and a couple of short stories were close enough to the borderline that my counts could be off by 2 or 3 either way. Taking into account the reprint (Juliet Marillier's "Otherling", from the April 2001 Realms of Fantasy), about 188,000 words of new fiction were featured. As the size of the issues is pretty consistent, I'm guessing that the six 2003 issues including just under 300,000 words of new fiction. The overall quality is variable. The emphasis on humour leads to the occasional one-joke story, or the occasional story which belabors a joke too much, or, I should emphasize, the occasional story where I didn't get the joke but others might -- humour being the sort of thing that notoriously strikes different people differently. I'm not sure if it's editorial policy or happenstance, but each issue seems to include a story taking the name of the magazine seriously, and purporting to be an account of a journey on a commercial spaceliner, usually involving grotesque misunderstandings of alien customs. Of the novelettes I particularly enjoyed two contributions from Stephen Dedman, "Acquired Tastes" (October/November) and "Mortal Nature" (August/September), the first a time-travel story with a love triangle, a corrupt businessman, and a nice surprise ending; the second a tense adventure about a civil war on an alien planet and a visiting scientist, studying the dinosaur-like native fauna, who gets caught up in it. I also liked Howard Andrew Jones's "The Sybilline Books", a nice Rome/Carthage fantasy. Of the short stories, among the best were Geoffrey Maloney's "The Kaladashi Covenant", an interesting straight SF story about trading with powerful aliens; Sarah Prineas's "The Fates Take a Holiday", about, well, just that, with Clotho causing difficulties by meeting a nice young man; Robert Cox's "Rambling With Rose" is an affecting piece about a young man mourning his sister in an unusual way; and there was also nice work by Robert Neilson, Dirk Flinthart, Carl Frederick, Hank Quense, Edwina Harvey, Melissa Yuan-Innes, and Robert Hood.