Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: F&SF, 2004
F&SF published 78 stories in 2004, for a total of about 604,000 words of fiction, close to the same word count as last year. Two stories were reprints, both by Alex Irvine. "Peter Skilling" had appeared earlier in 2004 in the online 'zine Salon under the title "Retroactive Anti-Terror", and "A Peaceable Man" has appeared in Irvine's story collection _Unintended Consequences_ in 2003. These totaled a bit more than 18,000 words, so about 586,000 words were new. I do think these are just the sort of reprints magazines ought to consider -- those from sources their regular readers might have missed.
The F&SF stories this year included 5 novellas, 27 novelettes, and 46 short stories. Four of the short stories were short-shorts (under 1500 words). I think that this was an outstanding year at F&SF, the best in a long time, and I think it was probably the best magazine in the field this year.
Novellas
My favorite novella was Matthew Jarpe and Jonathan Andrew Sheen's "The Bad Hamburger" (December), a neat murder mystery in which the victim is an AI. Better for its extrapolation of how AIs might interact with humans than for its merely OK mystery plot. I suspect the consensus favorite is going to be Bradley Denton's "Sergeant Chip", which I liked well enough to put second on my list: the story of an enhanced dog, used by the military in a war that at least vaguely resembles the Iraq occupation, who finds his loyalty challenged by the perversity of his superiors' actions, finally placing it with a more appropriate group. Third would be Albert E. Cowdrey's "The Tribes of Bela", an adventure filled story of biological mystery, murder, and disaster on an alien planet.
Of the other novellas, I enjoyed R. Garcia y Robertson's "Stuck Inside of Mobile", a colorful alternate history tale of the Civil War, with submarines (and Jules Verne!), pretty girls who aren't quite what they seem, escaped slaves, and plenty of action. I didn't much like the fifth novella, Jim Young's "Ultraviolet Night".
Novelets
I had bunches of novelets marked as outstanding. My favorite overall was, I think, Ysabeau S. Wilce's "Metal More Attractive" (February). (She used the byline Y. S. Wilce for a story (possibly set in the same milieu) in Asimov's. Wonder why?) This story is a lovely and cruel, sort of a Western (Mexican-style) set in a fantastical world, a convoluted tangle of marriage contracts, unsuitable love affairs, familial politics, and Magick. From the same February issue I also liked Paolo Bacigalupi's "The People of Sand and Slag" a great deal, a striking weird SF story, set in an environmentally devastated future, full of surprises.
Several of the best qualify as horror of one sort or another. Daniel Abraham's "Flat Diane" (October/November) is about a divorced man who unwittingly allows his daughter to become endangered when she sends a silhouette of herself (Flat Diane) in the mail. Also from October/November is Gene Wolfe's almost genially creepy "The Little Stranger" (7000 words by my estimate but listed as a novelet, and 7000 words is within my margin of error), about an old woman living in a gingerbread house, and gypsies, and a dead correspondent. Michael Shea's "The Growlimb" (January) concerns a Vietnam vet who has gone off to live in the woods, and who is convinced he has been followed for decades -- until developers, and a co-worker and her boyfriend, become involved. Michael Libling's "Christmas in the Catskills" is a strong Christmas horror story about a woman and her stupid husband who get marooned with a strange clan during a snowstorm.
Peter Beagle's "Quarry" (May) is wonderful adventure fantasy, about a young man and an old man, each followed by monsters (of different sorts), who join in an uneasy alliance to help the other. Also from May is a good, dark, cynical SF story by Robert Reed, "How It Feels", about alien visitors who like to possess humans for brief times to experience Earth, and how several different people respond to possession. (And yes, something else is really going on -- but let Reed tell the story!)
James Stoddard's "The Battle of York" (July) is a delight, telling the legend of General Washington, his battle-axe Valleyforge, his horse Silver, the evil giant Britannia, and a mission to the Mount of Rushmore from the perspective of 3000 years in the future.
Matthew Hughes in "Mastermindless" (March) introduced to short fiction readers his Vancean milieu (explicitly Vancean -- the conceit is that the stories are set in the age just prior to _The Dying Earth_), the same setting as his novels. This novelet, and two good short stories, "Falberoth's Ruin" and "Relics of the Thim", feature private discriminator Hengis Hapthorn solving somewhat mordantly flavored cases. But my favorite Hughes story this year is "A Little Learning", a novelet from the June issue, which doesn't feature Hapthorn. It tells of hapless scholar Guth Bandar's journey through various universes, or parts of the noosphere.
There were several other strong novelets. Two came from Charles Coleman Finlay. One ("After the Gaud Chrysalis") is part of an ongoing adventure fantasy series featuring a mismatched pair, the soldier Vertir and the scribe Kuikin -- this seems a priority of Gordon van Gelder's, to revive adventure fantasy, perhaps with a prejudice towards Leiber-style stories. The other was a dark SF adventure set in the asteroids, "The Seal Hunter". Robert Reed had a good story of the Ship, "River of the Queen". Two more strong SF stories set on other planets are Mark Tiedemann's "Rain from Another Country" and James L. Cambias's "The Ocean of the Blind".
Really an exceptional set of stories. Indeed I was surprised at going through my notes just how many novelets I really liked this year. And I haven't even mentioned a story I suspect may be among the most popular (though I don't rank it all that highly): Richard Chwedyk's "In Tibor's Cardboard Castle". Irvine's "A Peaceable Man" is also a good story, not on my lists partly because it's a 2003 story.
My 1-2-3 order would be Wilce/Bacigalupi/Beagle -- with maybe the Stoddard sneaking in. Not that there is an F&SF readers' poll ...
Short Stories
There were also quite a few very fine short stories. At the top I'd list two from April ("The Seventh Daughter" by Bruce McAllister and "Gas" by Ray Vukcevich), "Jew if by Sea" by Richard Mueller (May), two more from July ("A Balance of Terrors" by Albert E. Cowdrey and "Johnny Beansprout" by Esther M. Friesner), two from August (Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Start the Clock" and Carol Emshwiller's "The Library"), and finally three from October/November (Michael Kandel's "Time to Go", Robert Reed's "Opal Ball" and M. Rickert's "Cold Fires"). There was also good work from Charles Coleman Finlay, Kit Reed, A. A. Attanasio, Steven Utley, Matthew Hughes, and James Patrick Kelly.
Of these I would have "Opal Ball", Robert Reed's story of a couple who fall in love in a future ruled by predictive gambling pools, despite the pools' prediction it won't work out; ranked just barely ahead of Rosenbaum's "Start the Clock", in which people are frozen at a their biological age for a long time -- how do they adapt, and do they change when there's a cure? Third? McAllister's story, perhaps, or Cowdrey's.
Silly Numbers
As with the other more regular magazines, I compiled some geeky statistics. This year just over 100,000 words were devoted to the novellas, nearly 190,000 to the novelets, and about 215,000 to the short stories. Average novella: 20400 words, average novelet: 10600 words, average short story: 4700 words.
