From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:45:26 2004 Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:23:38 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton Subject: Re: Summary: Stories from Miscellaneous Sources, 2003 Let me fix that post -- I had meant to make a couple changes and forgot. Summary: Stories from Miscellaneous Sources, 2003 Here are a number of stories from miscellaneous places -- the New Yorker, the online newsmagazine Salon, the British paper The Independent on Sunday, a couple more online source, the New York Review of Science Fiction, a free Tor handout I picked up at a bookstore counter, a college literary magazine, greeting cards, etc. 20 more stories, 4 of them novelettes, about 98,000 words. The New Yorker seems to publish three or four SFnal or Fantastical stories every year. This year I counted four: "Jon", by George Saunders; "Ice Man", by Haruki Murakami; "The Brief History of the Dead", by Kevin Brockmeier; "A Stone Woman", by A. S. Byatt. The Saunders and Byatt stories are novelettes. (There was also a Stephen King short story that I read as mainstream, but Ellen Datlow, at least, read it as at least slightly fantastical (there is a phone call that might have been precognitive).) "Jon" is SF, about people growing up as sort of a permanent reality series. "A Stone Woman" is fantasy, about, well, a woman who literally turns to stone. My favorite of these is Brockmeier's story, set in an afterlife where people linger until all the people who knew them in life are in their turn dead. Salon published a Cory Doctorow story in 2002, "Ownz0red", that just turned up on the Nebula Preliminary Ballot. In 2003 they published four more stories, all hip near-future high-tech SF, two by Doctorow, two by William Shunn. All were at least entertaining. My favorite was probably Doctorow's "Liberation Spectrum", about ... One of my favorite short stories of the year appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction: Henry Wessell's "Ten Bears, or, A Journey to the Weterings". This is a tissue of allusions to the work of Dutch mystery writer Janwillem van de Wetering in the form of a fantastical mystery concerning a seller of "dream-objects". The academic-oriented feminist anthology Envisioning the Future had two new stories (and quite a few reprints, plus some essays). Editor Marleen Barr had the gall to include her own story, the truly dreadful "Superfeminist; or, a Hanukah Carol", as well as an OK short story by Pamela Sargent, "Utmost Bones". I received an Independence Day card and a Christmas card from Wormhole Books, each with a fairly enjoyable short-short, one by Steve Rasnic Tem, the other by Edward Bryant. Stories seen online included "A Swim in the Laughing Soup", a very short play by James Patrick Kelly that as far as I could see was the only original piece of fiction Fantastic Metropolis posted this year -- it didn't do much for me, alas; Neal Asher's "Watchcrab" at an interesting mostly criticism-oriented site called The Agony Column -- I've liked some of Asher's stories, but this one didn't work for me; and "The Wizard of North America", a fairly fun wildly posthuman and erotic short story by Claude Lalumière that appeared at Fiction Inferno. China Miéville published a story in The Independent on Sunday, a UK newspaper -- it was called "Foundation", and I didn't like it. Alan De Niro has a pretty fair story called "Child Assassins" in issue #22 of the publication One Story, that prints very slim chapbooks containing one story each issue. Michael Jasper sent me a copy (as a premium for contributing to Strange Horizons) of the North Carolina State student magazine Windhover which included his story "The Deck", which he wrote a few years ago as an undergraduate. It's not bad: a satirical piece about parking regulations gone insane. And, last and least, Tor issued a free advertising handout as promotional material for the latest Dune prequel, including a Dune short story by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, "Whipping Mek". I thought it was pretty bad, cute reference to a Frank Herbert novel title notwithstanding.