Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Online Summation, 2005
I thought I would do a summation of the SF I saw online this year. I believe I have covered every online site I read this year, except for a couple of things I plan to cover in a catchall "miscellaneous" category later. (Things like Bruce Holland Rogers's email short-shorts, stories that were posted on author websites, usually promoting novels (the only example so far is a Rangergirl story by Tim Pratt), and a few SFnal Sherlock Holmes pastiches that were published on the BBC site.)
I actually conceived the notion that a "Best Online SF of the Year" collection would be a good idea. Not only would it represent a different slant on "Best of" collections, but it would have the virtue of bringing every story in it to print form for the first time. I made a tentative approach to a publisher about this idea, and was told it was too niche an idea, and that there were already too many Best Of anthologies -- and I can't really dispute those objections. But I still figured it'd be neat to list the Best Online stories of the year.
I read all or part of the fiction in 10 different online sites devoted primarily to periodic web publishing of original SF short fiction (and poetry, in many cases). These are Sci Fiction (weekly), Strange Horizons (weekly), From the Asylum (monthly), Lone Star Stories (bimonthly), Lenox Avenue (bimonthly), Chiaroscuro (quarterly), Fortean Bureau (quarterly), Ideomancer (quarterly), Abyss and Apex (quarterly), and Infinite Matrix (irregular). In addition, I read 4 magazines distributed electronically, usually in .pdf format and sometimes in additional forms. These are Oceans of the Mind (quarterly), Aeon (quarterly), Son and Foe (planned quarterly, I believe), and Challenging Destiny (twice yearly). Several news/feature oriented online sites publish fiction with some regularity: Revolution SF and Futurismic manage pretty much monthly posting of new stories, while SciFi Dimensions, SF Crowsnest, and The Agony Column feature new fiction more rarely. Add Infinity Plus, which posts stories quite often, though they are usually reprints. And of course there is the Amazon Shorts program, which actually made quite a respectable amount of decent stuff available this year.
By no means does this exhaust the sources of online SF: not even close. But those are the sites I've seen. Between them and the miscellaneous sources I mentioned, I read somewhat more than a million and a half words new SF online in 2005. There were 4 novellas, 50 novelettes, and 333 short stories, 107 of the latter short-shorts. (Short-shorts are common in online fiction, but this total is enhanced because it includes a whole bunch from Bruce Holland Rogers.)
There is of course sad news to report on this front. The leading online SF magazine of all time, Sci Fiction, stopped publishing as of the end of 2005. One of the promising newcomers, Lenox Avenue, also stopped publishing. Fortean Bureau, Abyss and Apex, and Ideomancer all have struggled a bit, signalled by each declining in frequency from monthly or bimonthly to quarterly. Infinite Matrix continues to struggle somewhat as well. And one final snippet of an online magazine is a signal to yet another demise for the oldest SF magazine of them all: Amazing, newly relaunched in 2004, managed only a couple of issues in 2005 before the final issue came out in .pdf format only.
Here's my dream "best online" anthology Table of Contents. (I caveat this, of course, by noting that in real life it might not be possible to get rights to all the stories. And there might be special problems in some cases: for example, I don't know what the contractual status of Amazon Shorts is as far as print reprints are concerned.) I thought about 100,000 words would be appropriate, but (me being disciplined as ever), the stories listed are closer to 125,000 words total. The ordering is alphabetical by author. No authors were duplicated. (This was on purpose, but it pretty much worked out that way anyway. Jay Lake and Jenn Reese together, and Samantha Henderson, had other stories which were close to making my cut, however.)
"Is There Life After Rehab?", by Pat Cadigan (Sci Fiction) (6400)
"Super-Villains", by Michael Canfield (Son and Foe) (8100)
"I, Robot", by Cory Doctorow (Infinite Matrix) (15400)
"Consensus Building", by Tom Doyle (Futurismic) (4100)
"Pip and the Fairies", by Theodora Goss (Strange Horizons) (3000)
"Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died", by Samantha Henderson (Fortean Bureau) (4200)
"After the Sabines", by Sarah A. Hoyt (Amazing) (4500)
"The Jenna Set", by Daniel Kaysen (Strange Horizons) (5000)
"Jane", by Marc Laidlaw (Sci Fiction) (3800)
"A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story", by Douglas Lain (Strange Horizons) (4700)
"To Live Forever", by Jay Lake (Challenging Destiny) (9000)
"Real People Slash", by Nick Mamatas (Son and Foe) (8200)
"A Treatise on Fewmets", by Sarah A. Prineas (Lone Star Stories) (5500)
"Disposable Children", M. Lynx Qualey (Lenox Avenue) (700)
"Tales of the Chinese Zodiac", by Jenn Reese (Strange Horizons) (5200)
"Missy Victoria", by Bruce Holland Rogers (www.shortshortshort.com) (1000)
"Panacea", by Jason Stoddard (Sci Fiction) (13800)
"Triceratops Summer", by Michael Swanwick (Amazon Shorts) (4600)
"Invisible", by Steve Rasnic Tem (Sci Fiction) (6800)
"The King of Where-I-Go", by Howard Waldrop (Sci Fiction) (8400)
"Sins of the Father", by S. E. Ward (Chiaroscuro) (3900)
