From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:42:13 2004
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 22:25:37 -0600
From: Rich Horton <richard.horton@sff.net>
Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction
Subject: Summary: Some Online Venues, 2003

Summary: Some Online Sources of Fiction, 2003

Here I'm going to cover a few less well-known online sites that at
least occasionally publish new short SF. I must confess at first that
there are any number of sites I've not really looked into, some of
which have pretty decent reputations (Fortean Bureau comes to mind).

1. Lost Pages (<URL:http://www.lostpages.net/lostpages.html>)

Lost Pages is a new venture edited by Claude Lalumière. Claude
published the first issue in September, aiming for monthly issues. He
dutifully managed another issue in each of October, November, and
December, but he has now announced that he will relax to a quarterly
schedule -- I suspect a wise decision. (I have contributed reviews to
issues 1 and 4 of Lost Pages.)

I think my tastes overlap with Claude's to some degree -- at any rate,
I have liked almost all the fiction published there. There have been a
total of ten stories, all short, summing to some 32,000 words of
fiction. Worth mentioning are three rather odd stories by Bruce
Holland Rogers, concerning an unusual Montreal poet named Donat Bobet;
a nice horror-flavored story set at a girl's school: "The Dormitory of
the Friable Little Girls" by Melissa Yuan-Innes
, and a wild SF story by Richard Calder, "Stabat Mater".

2. infinity plus (<URL:http://www.infinityplus.co.uk//index.htm>)

infinity plus has been around for several years. It's an outstanding
general interest SF site, maintained by Keith Brooke with the help of
Nick Gevers and Paul Barnett. It features plenty of articles and
interviews, and a ton of stories and novel excerpts. Most of the
stories are reprints, but very occasionally they publish originals. It
should be noted that some of the reprints are practically original to
the site -- recently they posted Gene Wolfe's "The Arimaspian Legacy",
previously published only as an expensive Cheap Street chapbook, and
Jeff VanderMeer's "Ghost in the Machine", a very early story only
published in a "small magazine that soon disappeared".

This year I counted 6 new stories, all short, totaling some 15,000
words. The authors were Anna Tambour (twice), Roger Levy, David
Mathew, C. S. Thompson, and David D. Levine. Tambour and Levine, at
least, are new writers I definitely am keeping an eye on. All the
stories were decent work, though none of them quite spectacular.
Tambour's "Temptation of the Seven Scientists" is perhaps the best.

3. s1ngularity (<URL:http://www.sfsite.com/singularity/>)

Gabe Chouinard started this webzine last spring, but quickly ran into
trouble (he's had some rather wrenching personal problems, according
to his blog). He is currently pondering whether to continue it. I saw
three new stories, all quite interesting: Gavin Grant's "Softly, With
a Big Stick", Michael Jasper's "Gunning for the Buddha", and E. T.
Ellison's "Night Funnels". These total some 15,000 words, with the
Ellison story being novelette-length. I liked "Night Funnels" best:
it's an odd story set in a very colourful fantasy world, where "funnel
fairies" pour ideas into people's heads at night.

4. Elysian Fiction (<URL:http://www.sfroundup.com/elysian/>)

This is a Fantasy-oriented 'zine published by Jim Bailey. It's notable
for publishing some longer stories, even novellas. I'm assuming for
the purposes of this summary that Jim won't post an issue at 11:59 or
so on New Year's Eve, which he did last year. Failing that, there was
one issue this year, #4, in May. It included 10 stories, about 62,000
words total. One novella, one novelette, the rest shorts. I liked
short stories by Hwei Lim ("My Yellow Diamond") and Ron Collins ("A
Lingering Scent of Lightning") the best. Overall, the 'zine has been
of rather variable quality -- some decent work, some lesser work.

5. The Night Land
(<URL:http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/nightmap.html>)

The Night Land is a rather interesting site run by Andy Robertson. It
is devoted to the proposition "that _The Night Land_, though flawed
and grotesque, is one of the world's greatest works of fiction." It
includes some criticism and discussion of the book (by William Hope
Hodgson, I should clarify). It also includes a great deal of what
might be called "Night Land Fan Fiction". I admit I didn't find that
notion promising, but some of the stories have been rather good. A
couple have appeared in Interzone. The only two I read on the site
this year were two novellas by John C. Wright, which total 55,000
words. The better of them is quite good: "Awake in the Night", about a
man who travels into the wilderness around the Redoubt in hopes of
rescuing his friend and the woman they both loved. The other, longer
story, "The Last of All Suns", indulged a bit too much for my taste in
Wright's weakness for philosophical digressions. In total they seem to
have published about 15 new stories this year. I believe a book
collecting some of the stories is planned.

It's an odd site in many ways, but very well done and original.