Changes at Strange Horizons

Though it may have been a couple of years since I've read Strange Horizons on a regular basis, but I wanted to note the changing of the guard over there.  Susan Marie Groppi, the long time fiction editor, is stepping down. 

Under her guidance, Strange Horizons has been nominated for the Hugo and Groppi herself was recognized with a World Fantasy Award.

Strange Horizons, change is in the air

A day after winning a World Fantasy Award for her work on Strange Horizons, Susan Marie Groppi announced that she was stepping down as Editor in Chief of Strange Horizons. 

Taking her place is Niall Harrison, the previous Reviews Editor at Strange Horizons.  Abigail Nussbaum will take Niall's position as head of the Reviews department.  Good choices, both of them.  Niall and Abigail are smart folk. 

Strange Horizons remains one of the premier places to find great short fiction, often from writers who are just beginning to make a name for themselves in the genre (as well as from more established writers).  Their book reviews are just as good. 

I expect Niall and Abigail will maintain the high standards of Strange Horizons and continue to deliver excellent fiction and nonfiction.  Congrats to them, and best of luck to Susan Groppi.

Now it's time to go check out some of that excellent fiction over there.

Bears! I've to read this!

I’ve been slack on reading short fiction lately (though I did finally finish that issue of Weird Tales), but I stopped by Strange Horizons and there is a new story by Leah Bobet up. I mostly liked her previous SH story.

This one, however, has a bloody brilliant hook.

Ninety-eight percent of all fictional deaths are directly attributable to being eaten by bears.

Bullshit, you say? What about those shooting and stabbings and drownings and beatings and death by Doomed Gay Manlove?

Well, it's not my problem if you can't see the bears.

I have no idea what the rest of the story is about yet, but I loooooooooove this opening.

Strange Horizons: August 20 - September 10, 2007

August 20: Little Ambushes, by Joanne Merriam. A woman takes in an alien to her home in some sort of cultural exchange program even though the aliens do not seem interested in cultural exchange. Little Ambushes is a sweet little story laced with sadness. Even though the story takes place entirely in Sarah's house there is discussion and description of aspects of the alien culture which leads to this gem of a sentence:

She laid on her bed—on her and Mark's bed—and watched the late afternoon light move across her ceiling, and thought about a world where laughter sounded like war.

It is the ending of the sentence that hits the sorrow of the scene.


August 27: Practicing My Sad Face, by Marc Shultz. Billy is a trauma victim. He remembers nothing, but he has been given experimental implants for his vision and memory, sort of like the technology we read about in other stories where identities and history show up on a screen before his eyes. Conceptually the story is interesting enough, but it fails to engage the reader at any point. I think it's supposed to be brutally sad, but it isn't. Not emotionally, anyway.

As I would have told the President myself if his handlers had let me get through, you can't make someone with a damaged hippocampus good as new by networking his eyes and ears to a prosthetic memory database, no matter how smart the search algorithms are. The problem goes deeper than that. Billy is trapped within the temporal bounds of short-term memory. He has no self.

September 3: All Kinds of Reasons, by Katherine Maclaine. I had an uncomfortable sick feeling in my chest through most of the story. That feeling started when the story did and didn't stop until the story ended...because of the possibility of what Maclaine was going to introduce, what she was going to offer the reader. The fact that Maclaine didn't go as far as I had feared did not matter because there was no pleasure in the reading.

The baby had large eyes that tilted slightly upwards, a snub nose, fleshy cheeks, and an upper lip that split straight up to the nostrils. Its fingers were melded or missing entirely—lobster claws. The legs, attached together from hips to ankles, made a mermaid tail, and it had the beginnings of short, pointed teeth.

It looked like a fucking monster.

September 10: In Stone, by Helen Keeble. I’m confused. That’s all.

Short Fiction 'Zines

In light of the Short Fiction discussions I have come across recently, here's a glimpse of what I'm reading.


Actively Read:
Subterranean Online
Strange Horizons
Lone Star Stories
Chiaroscuro
Clarkesworld
Weird Tales (subscription)
Heliotrope


Single Issue Pick Ups:
Steampunk Magazine # 1 (not so good)
Subterranean # 4 (the John Scalzi SFF cliche issue...it’s good, just not as great as the Online edition)
Electric Velocipede # 11
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet # 20
Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies (solid anthology of four stories)



I will definitely pick up more print editions of Subterranean. I really love this small press. I fully expect to order more from the Rabid Transit line of chapbooks. I still need to read EV and LCRW (still need to receive LCRW for that matter), so opinions forthcoming for those zines. I imagine I will purchase a chapbook or two from EV, though. I am very interested in the just published William Shunn chapbook.

I hope / intend on purchasing some One Story, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and perhaps Jim Baen's Universe at some time in the future.

What is readily apparent here is that I only subscribe to one magazine and that’s just because they had a great discount / deal for the subscription. Otherwise I probably would not subscribe to Weird Tales. I would love a similar offer for Asimov's or F&SF. When we're talking $5 (or so) at a time, it is easier to budget in a single issue of a zine. Pulling a subscription fee at any single time is a bit tougher and questionable if the value is there. For markets that only publish a couple of times a year, one at a time is a decent value and gives me a chance to see if this is something that is worth an additional investment. I don't know that I have that option with an Asimov's.

I know there are other free markets out there, but for whatever reason the Actively Read ones are the ones I have focused on before I decide to try to branch out again and find some more.

Strange Horizons

Next to Subterranean Online, Strange Horizons is quite possibly publishing some of my favorite online fiction today. Recently I haven't had much to talk about in the world of short fiction, but I’m still reading through Strange Horizons last month or two (I got behind) and they've got some nice quirky stuff. Nothing that right now makes me want to jump up and down and shout from the treetops about (let's ignore how I got up to the treetops), but decent stuff all the same.


Recent Reads:
The Perfume Eater, by R. J. Astruc
The Girl from Another World, by Leah Bobet
Wake Up Call, by Leslie Brown
The Captain is the Last to Leave, by Caroline Lockwood Nelson
Artifice and Intelligence, by Tim Pratt
Limits, by Donna Glee Williams


I rather like The Perfume Eater and The Girl from Another World, though Bobet's ending left a bit to be desired. The Perfume Eater is better. Limits is a decent story, too, after the first couple of pages when we start figuring out what it might be all about.

underwhelm me again

After I read the excellent A Letter Never Sent I have come across a handful of underwhelming stories. Starting with a Cat Rambo story, which was decent (I rather enjoyed the manticore dropping the refrain "gnaw your bones" to frighten people), I’ve read six stories. Brazos, by Jerome Steuart, was surprisingly good. It deals with a man talking to the father of a River God down in Texas. The River God wants to marry the man’s daughter, but the father has read all the myths and knows that it generally does not end well. Strange Horizons has fairly consistently published quality stories and Brazos, while not one of the best, is solid. Sadly, the Heliotrope stories all disappointed. Honey Mouth had some potential, but On the Air and American Gothic...very disappointing. I really want Heliotrope to be a solid market for stories which publishes fiction which astounds and makes me sit up and notice. But, taking the first two issues into account...so far it isn't. Transtexting Pose from Clarkesworld...anyone know what that was about? Made no sense at all! The Cat Rambo was okay, but overall, I’m underwhelmed with this grouping.

I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said - Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld: July 2007)
Honey Mouth - Samantha Henderson (Heliotrope #1)
On the Air - Edward Morris (Heliotrope #1)
American Gothic - Michael Colangelo (Heliotrope #1)
Brazos - Jerome Steuart (Strange Horizons: July 2, 2007)
Transtexting Pose - Daniel Speegle (Clarkesworld: July 2007)

Bottom line: the only story I had any sort of appreciation for was I'll Gnaw Your Bones.