From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:41:24 2004 Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:14:39 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Summary: Say ..., 2003 Summary: Say ..., 2003 Last year Christopher Rowe, Gwenda Bond, and Alan DeNiro began Say ..., a twice-yearly 'zine of stories centered around a question, different for each issue. Say... fits fairly clearly into the "slipstream" pigeonhole, which is to say that they publish some fantasy, some SF, some mainstream, and lots of weird stuff that's hard to place. This year there were two issues, #2 subtitled "what time is it?" and #3 subtitled "aren't you dead?" The two issues featured 17 stories, all short, total ling a bit over 50,000 words of fiction, with one story a reprint, thus some 45,000 words of new fiction. My favorite story in #2 was Richard Butner's "Drifting", about about a waiter with a friend who wants to be a screenwriter, and a strange woman called the Zen Mistress. I also liked, and liked it still more on rereading, Kelly Link's "The Cannon", an offbeat story told in a charming and engaging voice, about a man who marries a cannon, and many other things. From #3 my favorite was Scott Westerfeld's arresting and sad story "That Which Does Not Kill Us", about a man who goes on a date with a technologically resurrected woman. (This story is a reprint from the 2003 Australian anthology _Agog! Terrific Tales_, and I think reprinting it in a U. S. publication makes eminent sense, as not many in this country will have seen _Agog! Terrific Tales_.) Also good were Mark Rich's "Swaths of Grass", a very strange Science Fiction story about new worlds, and robots, and lawn mowers; and Sonya Taaffe's "Kouros", about a man trying to bring his lover back from the dead. The other stories were generally of pretty good quality as well -- I might particularly mention another Rich story from #2, and work by Jennifer Rachel Baumer and Justina Robson in #3. There were also a number of poems and an interview with John Kessel. Say... has been very impressive for its three issues to date.