A couple of years ago Wyrm Publishing issued a book I edited called Unplugged, which was my choice of the best stories published online in 2008. Last year I had hoped to publish a second book, to be called Rebooted, with a selection from 2009. Alas, due to disappointing sales for Unplugged, and a couple of other factors, the book was cancelled. ( Read more... )

Summary: New Stories from Collections, 2009

This year I saw:

from James P. Blaylock's Metamorphosis, Blaylock and Alex Haniford's "Houses" and Blaylock and Brittany Cox's "P-38".

from Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days, "Vishnu at the Cat Circus"

from Paul Di Filippo's Harsh Oases, "Aurorae" and "A Game of Go"

from Paul Witcover's Everland, "After Ivy", " ( Read more... )

Summary: "Novella Chapbooks", 2009

[revised to include Beth Bernobich's very nice Adrian Dee novella from PS Publishing, Ars Memoriae.]

This year I saw no less than 22 books that fit my definition of "novella chapbook", by which I really mean single-story chapbooks, because the stories are sometimes shorts or novelettes, and even though in general ( Read more... )

Summary: Innsmouth Free Press, 2009

Silvia Moreno-Garcia pointed me at Innsmouth Free Press, a webzine she runs with Paula R. Stiles. (The editorial staff is Moreno-Garcia as Publisher, Stiles as Editor-in-Chief, and Mari Ness and Amanda J. Spedding as Field Correspondents.) It's a "fictional newspaper" on generally Lovecraftian subjects, and they ( Read more... )

Hadley-Rille books, 2009

Hadley-Rille continues to publish original anthologies at an impressive rate, under the leadership of Eric T. Reynolds. This year they also published some novellas on ancient history subjects, some novels, and a collection by promising new writer Camille Alexa (whose career has been strongly supported by Hadley-Rille, one ( Read more... )

Summary: Stories from Miscellaneous sources, 2009

What's the difference between this and the previous "Miscellaneous Sources" category? The previous category was for SF-oriented magazines and webzines that I couldn't cover at length. This is for stories from non-SF sources (like the New Yorker), or from places I only sampled briefly, or from less ( Read more... )

Summary: Cosmos, 2009

Cosmos is an Australian popular science magazine that features an SF story in each issue. They also occasionally feature stories on their website (and the website also sometimes reprints stories from the print magazine, a few months later). The fiction editor is Damien Broderick. They are bimonthly, so 6 issues appeared in 2009 ( Read more... )

Summary: Some Miscellaneous sources, 2009

Here's some quick looks at a variety of websites and magazines of which I only saw scattered issues this year, or which only published a few stories.

1. Focus

Focus is the British Science Fiction Association magazine for writers. They don't normally publish fiction, but for the BSFA's 50th anniversary they ran ( Read more... )

Summary: Three Science Fiction anthologies, 2009

These three books I have linked because they are all explicitly focussed on Science Fiction (as opposed to Fantasy).

The books are:

Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams;
Metatropolis, edited by John Scalzi; and
The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, edited by Mike Ashley.

Between them they included 25 ( Read more... )

Summary: Kaleidotrope, 2009

There were two issues of Kaleidotrope in 2009, the sixth and seventh. Between the two there were 28 new stories, 3 novelettes and 25 shorts (11 short-shorts -- the 'zine has always featured a lot of short-shorts), a bit less then 90,000 words total. In addition each story features a reprint. There were also quite a few ( Read more... )