From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:41:56 2004 Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 19:22:35 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton Subject: Summary: Oceans of the Mind, 2003 Summary: Oceans of the Mind, 2003 Oceans of the Mind is a quarterly magazine, distributed by email, that has a strongly SFnal focus. It is formatted in .pdf. Editor/publisher Richard Freeborn has managed a very regular quarterly schedule through 10 issues to date. Each issue has a theme: this year's were Women Writers, Chesley Bonestell, SF Mysteries, and Australian Writers. The four issues included a total of 26 stories, 5 of them novelettes (one very borderline in length), the others short stories. Just under 160,000 words total. I thought the best story was Stephen Dedman's "Desirée", from the Winter issue (#10), about a virtual girlfriend of a high school kid, and his problems paying her license fees -- with some really nice thematic backing to give the story depth. I also liked Ian Creasey's "Demonstration Day" (Fall), funny stuff about out-of-control physicists at a conference, with a missing scientist, an ambitious demonstrator, time travel, and a narrator who sells gadgets to the experimenters. Rob Hood's "Lady of the Flies" (Winter) is an interesting and unusual time-travel story. The Spring "Women Writers" issue had good stories from Mary Turzillo, K. D. Wentworth, and Sherry Ramsay. And there was also decent work this year from Kenneth Chiacchia and Cherith Baldry.