Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Realms of Fantasy, 2004
Realms of Fantasy published some 209,000 words of fiction this year, just slightly more than they published last year. (Though as always I caution that word counting is difficult with Realms of Fantasy, given their proclivity to change font sizes, use lots of different borders and interior story quotes, and irregular illustrations.) There were 41 stories in all, 9 novelettes, 32 short stories, of which a surprising 9 were "short-shorts" (though lots of these were at my unofficial upper bound of 1500 words).
Of the novelettes I thought the longest was also the strongest, Ian McDowell's "They Are Girls, Green Girls" (October). (At 15,000 words this is also very nearly the longest story Realms of Fantasy has ever published.) This story tells of a pair of girls feeling out of place in rural North Carolina -- one girl in particular, of Chinese extraction, feels called to her Grandmother Forest, present in the North Carolina backwoods as much as she is in China. Also good was Sarah Prineas's "The Chamber of Forgetting" (December), about an assassin who is captured and punished by having his memory erased -- is the resulting person the same person guilty of the murders? And I liked Karen D. Fishler's "Country Life" (June), about a tax collector trying to collect from a rather unusual family in a version of 19th Century France, and William R. Eakin's "Still Man" (February), another story set in the rural South, about a social worker trying to deal with a moonshiner and his near feral daughter.
Of the short stories I thought the standouts were Jay Lake's "The Water Castle" (August), Rudi Dornemann's "Embers" (October), David D. Levine's "Charlie the Purple Giraffe Was Acting Strangely" (June), Richard Parks's "The Right God" (August), and Tim Pratt's "In a Glass Casket" (October). The Lake story is about a girl in a world racked by war between two slightly different human species who tries to find a solution aside from violence. Dornemann's story concerns a clockwork man coming to a town suspicious of such folk, and the woman who takes a liking to him. Levine's piece is about a cartoon character who loses his focus when he becomes convinced people -- not from within the cartoon -- are watching and laughing. Parks's story is a sweet thing about two people who become prophets of a couple of decidedly minor gods. And Pratt's is an offbeat Sleeping Beauty variant, in which the boy who awakes the sleeping girl must confront her abusive father. There were also strong stories from Gene Wolfe (one alone and one amusing story with Brian A. Hopkins), Tom Gerencer, Tanith Lee, and Joe Murphy.
In the geeky stats department, the 9 novelets average 9900 words, and the 32 short stories, about 3750 words.