Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Apex Digest, 2005
Apex Digest is a new SF/Horror magazine that rather impressively managed four issues in 2005. Each issue was pretty generously stuffed with fiction and essays -- about 50,000 words of fiction per issue. Indeed, there were a total of almost exactly 200,000 words of fiction, 194,000 of them new (one story was a reprint). 6 novelettes, 36 short stories (35 new), 7 of the short stories "short-shorts". (The magazine features one short-short per issue as what it calls a "Parting Shot".) The editor is Jason Sizemore.
I found the quality to be fairly mixed. Some interesting stuff, and also some fairly long stories, which is nice to see. But some of the lesser stories are quite bad, in particular on occasion I was very disappointed with the prose quality.
But that is to complain about the bottom end, and with almost any publication, you can ignore the bottom end and focus on the best. M. M. Buckner's "Permutations" is a solid story (with an SFnal kick, even!) of the end of the world and a survivor in orbit. Ken Rand's "Phoenix" is another tale of disaster and survival. Lavie Tidhar's "Thrilling Wonder Stories #52: The Invasion of the Zog" is a just plain weird story about what it says. "Big Sister/Little Sister" by Jennifer Pelland is effective creepy horror about two sisters linked in a nasty way. "Alexandra and Nebs" by William R. Eakin is lyrical far future SF metaphorically treating Readers and Writers. Eugie Foster's "Oranges, Lemons, and Thou Beside Me" is an effective and original story of a brother and sister and their unhealthy obsession with each other, and how it plays out after a future war. There was also interesting work from James P. Hogan, Nancy Fulda, Ren Holton, and Daliso Chaponda.
