From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:40:50 2004 Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 20:38:48 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton Subject: Summary: The Third Alternative, 2003 Summary: The Third Alternative, 2003 The Third Alternative published four more issues in 2003, continuing on a regular quarterly schedule. The style remains unchanged -- a heavy dose of dark fantasy with lots of atmosphere, for lack of a better word. The covers were all in similar colours this year -- browns, ochres, yellows -- quite impressive and exotic, but also a bit depressing. Much the same could be said of the fiction: mostly in similar colours,,impressive and exotic but also depressing. Still I was impressed to look at my notes and see that I regarded almost every story this year as at least pretty good -- the overall quality of this magazine is quite high. The range of affect is perhaps limited, but the quality of the prose in specific and the stories in general is excellent. This year they published 25 stories, the same total as last year, but there were more longer stories and lots more fiction by wordcount. (Although I should emphasize that The Third Alternative is not an easy magazine for which to do word counts.) I counted one novella, five novelettes and 19 shorts, for a total of some 156,000 words of fiction, 30,000 words more than last year. My favourite stories were all short stories. Brian Aldiss's "Commander Calex Killed, Fire and Fury at the Edge of the World, Scones Perfect" is amusing and mordant, as a man flees a hopeless war with invading aliens, striking across Central Asia with a mysterious woman, ending up at a tea shop. Lynda E. Rucker's "The Chance Walker" is a spooky story of an American in the Czech Republic, slowly losing her mind after a fight with her boyfriend and a move to an eerie new flat, and a meeting with a strange new student. David Ira Cleary's "The Automatic Circus" is a grotesquely amusing tale of the demented Professor Stavan and his rivalry with his "colleague Monij", this time over a circus professing to feature automatons instead of humans. Absurd and paranoically funny stuff. The novella was by Lucius Shepard, one of many he published in an extremely prolific year: "The Park Sweeper". Good stuff, not great, about a couple of lovers in a Honduran town, and a strange "city" magically contained in the trees of a park. Perhaps oddly, I wasn't terribly impressed by the novelettes: the best was probably "The Nature of Stone", by Alexander Glass, with a nice central conceit, a woman with a face that, Medusa-like, turns others to stone. She's being treated by a shady doctor in hopes of gaining a normal face, but ... well, the story resolves itself a bit disappointingly, in a fairly routine tangle of revenge and crime lords. Other short stories that particularly impressed me were by John Aegard, Mike O'Driscoll, Jay Lake, and Ian Watson. But I reiterate that top to bottom, the stories in The Third Alternative were worthwhile -- overall, the magazine truly had a fine year.