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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Aeon, 2004
Aeon is a new magazine distributed through Electric Story, Fictionwise, and other places as an e-book. The first issue had a pretty impressive lineup, and I think it a promising publication. The editors are Bridget and Marti McKenna.
There were fully 84,000 words of fiction in the first issue. Well over half that total was devoted to a novel length excerpt from Walter Jon Williams' upcoming third Praxis novel. This excerpt is called "Logs".
The rest of the fiction consisted of two novelettes and five short stories, totalling some 37,500 words. Two stories were reprints, one from 1988, one from earlier in 2004. (Average novelette: about 10,000 words, average short story, about 3400 words.) The best piece in the issue was actually a reprint, "Talk of Mandrakes", a story by Gene Wolfe that was originally to be published in the revived If back in 1987, but which actually never appeared (If having died again) until a limited edition chapbook early in 2004. It's clever SF horror, about what came back from an alien planet. Lori Ann White's "Silver Land", a ghost story set in the American West, was my other favorite. John Meaney's colorful novelette "Blood and Verse" was a near miss for me -- a story I wanted to like, but just couldn't end up believing.
