Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Anthologies: "Other Genre", 2004
There were two curious "pairs" of anthologies aimed at readers of different genres, but containing SF (actually mostly Fantasy) stories.
The first pair was marketed to Romance readers. The books were Irresistible Forces, edited by Catherine Asaro; and To Weave a Web of Magic, which had no editor listed. The second pair was marketed to Mystery readers (actually -- these may have been marketed more to SF readers, but the books were explicitly mystery collections). These two books were Murder by Magic, edited by Rosemary Edghill; and Powers of Detection, edited by Dana Stabenow.
At last, I am nearly done. (Though there is a good chance I will read at least one more 2004 anthology.)
Subtotals: 4 books, 42 stories (8 novellas, 5 novelettes, 29 short stories), a total of just under 440,000 words.
I'll consider the pair of Romance anthologies first. The Romance market is very hospitable to novellas, but not (it seems) to shorter fiction, so these two books contained 8 novellas and 2 substantial novelettes. Irresistible Forces was evenly divided between Romance and SF writers, and the two best stories were each from one "camp". Lois McMaster Bujold offers "Winterfair Gifts", a rather light story set leading up to Miles Vorkosigan's wedding, and focussing on one of Miles's armsmen. Jo Beverly (who has some SF credits, including at least one appearance in Writers of the Future) has perhaps the most SFnally ambitious piece, "The Trouble With Heroes", about a hero in the fight against the "blighters" on an alien planet colonized by a curiously Anglophilic group; and the hero's difficulty in being accepted after the fighting is over. The best story in To Weave a Web of Magic is Patricia McKillip's "The Gorgon in the Cupboard", about a young painter who unwittingly calls forth the spirit of Medusa. Medusa helps the young man, just a bit, as he rediscovers a formal model of his, fallen on very hard times, and as he learns to see her as a woman, not just a painting to be.
The mystery anthologies are curiously linked. Some time ago Rosemary Edghill planned Murder By Magic, and Dana Stabenow wrote a story aimed at that book. But her story was too long for Edghill's book, so Stabenow ended up editing her own anthology -- in part it would seem to give her story a home. After all that, both books came out in the same month: October 2004 (though it looks like Murder By Magic was assembled by January of 2003).
I had similar reactions to both books -- lots of enjoyable stories, no real standouts. From Murder By Magic I remember being surprised by how much I enjoyed Mercedes Lackey's "Grey Eminence" (the longest story in either book at about 12,000 words), about the Harton School for Boys and Girl in London, and the rather unusually talented children who attend. I also liked stories from Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jennifer Roberson, and a few more. From Powers of Detection, the most ambitious story may have been one of the shortest: Michael Armstrong's "The Boy Who Chased Seagulls", in which an old man on an Alaskan beach tells a bratty boy a cautionary tale about chasing seagulls. Mike Doogan's "The Death of Clickclickwhistle" was fairly entertaining and also straightforward SF, which pleased me. Jay Caselberg's "Cairene Dawn" was an interesting use of the Osiris legend in a contemporary setting. Stabenow's story, and those by Sharon Shinn, Charlaine Harris, and a couple more were also decent work.
