From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:39:09 2004 Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 21:17:23 -0500 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton Subject: Summary: Asimov's, 2003 Summary, Asimov's, 2003 Asimov's published 70 stories in 2003. 13 were novellas, 30 were novelettes, and 29 were short-stories, two of the latter being arguably "short-shorts" (under 1500 words). This was about 775,000 words of fiction. (There was almost exactly the same wordage of fiction in both 2001 and 2002.) One note about word counts, and story counts by category. I do a word count on every story, and I use a standard "words/page" number that I've figured out for Asimov's. This number is based on counting characters (including spaces) per line for a few lines, averaging the total, and dividing by 6 to get words per line, then multiplying by the number of lines per page. I've used this method for years, and I believe it works pretty reliably. It's also an old industry standard, designed to measure how much space a story will occupy in a magazine, and thus to normalize between stories with lots of long words, and stories with lots of dialogue, and such like. However, things were complicated this year when Asimov's modified their format for some, but not all, of their stories. Basically, they used a slightly (very slightly) larger font, leading to a reduction in lines per page and of course words per page. In a typical issue most stories will be printed in this new format, but every so often (probably to squeeze a story that just barely fits into the magazine), a story will still use the old format. At any rate, my initial estimate for the new words/page count seems to have been a bit high. This is further complicated by the fact that I read the magazines in galley format, with no Table of Contents to helpfully indicate into which category a story fits. (I do get subscription copies later, but I don't change my spreadsheet.) The upshot is, my word counts might be off a bit, and perhaps more to the point my lists of numbers of stories in each category might conflict with the Asimov's ToC. One unusual example is Brian W. Aldiss's "The Hibernators". By my original count, it's 8800 words. By my revised count it's 8600 words. By a count using the lowest plausible "words/page" value I can conceive of, it's 8000 words. According to Jonathan Strahan, it's actually 7520 words according to the word counter in the electronic copy. (Which will be a count of "space-delimited character groups" -- probably Aldiss used lots of long words and maybe lots of dialogue.) All those lengths are novelette lengths, though Jonathan's electronic count is really close to the border. But it's listed as a short story in the ToC. Anyway, all that is anal-retentive geekery of the utmost sort -- and it has no effect on the virtues of the stories in question! None of my award vote choices are close to boundaries -- if they were, I would take care to vote them wherever Asimov's ToC had them categorized. For what it's worth, I made two Asimov's Readers' Poll predictions last year, and both were wrong. Novellas Asimov's always publishes lots of novellas, which is one thing I really like about the magazine. This year they averaged more than one a month, a very impressive total indeed, and the Double Issue had three very long ones (each close to 30,000 words)! My favorite novella this year was William Barton's "Off on a Starship", though Walter Jon Williams's "The Green Leopard Plague" is also very good, and I have a hard time choosing between them. The Barton story is a sly but loving critique of the 20th Century SF standard future, built around the story of a boy in the 1960s being carried off by an alien starship. The Williams story is a clever story of the man who founded the post-scarcity economy, and a woman in his future researching him. The other story on my ballot will by Steven Popkes's "The Ice", about a project to clone Gordie Howe, and a young hockey player who learns that he is one of those clones. Fine work, dealing with the problems of cloning in an intelligent and moving fashion. I'd say all this years novellas were worth reading. Next best were probably Williams's "Margaux", an extract from _The Praxis_; Kage Baker's "The Empress of Mars", an engaging but not very plausible or serious tale of ad hoc Martian colonization; and Charles Stross's "Curator", another in his Accelerando future (i.e. a Manfred Macx story, but now concerning the third generation in Manfred's family) -- still plenty of neat speculation but maybe just a bit too much "part of a novel" than an independent story. I can't really decide which story is the likely Reader's Poll winner. But what the heck -- it never pays to bet against Connie Willis, and her Christmas story, "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know", was pretty fun -- I'll make it my official prediction. But I believe the Barton, Williams, and Baker stories, as well as Lucius Shepard's "Ariel" and Allen Steele's "Benjamin the Unbeliever", all have good chances. Novelettes There were several strong novelettes this year as well. My favorite was Tom Purdom's "The Path of the Transgressor" (June), about a couple on a dangerous alien planet, facing both the menacing local fauna and prejudice from their fellow humans because the wife was previously a behaviourally conditioned whore (pretty much). The buried sting about the couple's relationship is a killer. I also like Lucius Shepard's "Only Partly Here" (March) quite a bit. It's the best 9/11 story I've seen yet, an atmospheric and moving ghost story, and very subdued for Shepard, always a good sign. Those will be 1,2 on my Reader's Poll Ballot. I'm leaning towards putting Neal Barrett, Jr.'s "Hard Times" (April) next, a satiric look at a future in which everything costs money, even the right to have functioning genitalia. But I could also put Alexander Glass's "From the Corner of My Eye" on the ballot, another "ghost story" of a sort -- in this case the ghosts are rogue AI's in a future with much computer mediation with people's perceptions. And Robert Reed's "Hexagons" is a strong alternate history, with a Hitler figure the main menace. And Stephen Baxter's "The Great Game" is one of his cynical and bracing stories of a changed future humanity engaged in a long war with inscrutable aliens -- not his best, but quite good. There was also strong work by William Sanders, Charles Stross, Brian W. Aldiss, Jack Williamson, Stephen Baxter, and Chris Willrich. My prediction for the Readers' Poll winner is Lucius Shepard. Short Stories Overall this category seemed a bit lackluster in 2003. My favorite is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "June Sixteenth at Anna's", a time viewer story with a slight 9/11 reference, at its core a quiet story of an old man, love, and memory. Perhaps the other two top short stories are Robert Reed's "Rejection", a curious look at the old idea of aliens coming to Earth to determine if we are worthy of galactic society; and Mike Resnick's "Robots Don't Cry", a very sentimental, even manipulative, but still effective (on me, anyway) story of a robot whose charge was a disabled girl. I also liked stories from Paul McAuley, Gene Wolfe, Jack Skillingstead, Kit Reed, and James Van Pelt. I really have no idea what might win the Readers' Poll. I'll go with Rusch's story for the sake of making a prediction. Dishonorable Mention The two stories this year that struck me as particularly weak were Tim Sullivan's "The Mouth of Hell", a silly thing about aliens in ancient Rome; and Daniel Abraham and Susan Fry's "The Bird of Paradise", a terribly shrill and unconvincing story about plague in Latin America. This last was perhaps the more disappointing because I've liked most of Abraham's work so much. Article 2246 From: Richard.Horton@sff.net (Richard Horton) Date: 15 Oct 2003 22:22:37 GMT Subject: Re: Summary: Asimov's, 2003 Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton I remembered that just as it's unwise to bet against Connie Willis, it's unwise to bet against Mike Resnick. So I'm officially changing my prediction for the Readers' Poll Award Winner for Short Story to "Robots Don't Cry". Also, if anyone is checking my math, for some reason I listed 30 novelettes and 29 short stories when in fact there were 29 novelettes and 28 short stories is Asimov's this year.