Summary: Flytrap, 2008

Flytrap is -- or I should say was -- a biennial 'zine, with issues #9 and #10 appearing in 2008. Editors Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw announced that #10 will be the last -- finishing on a nice round number. They have other creative projects taking much more of their time now, not least their son River (b. November 2007). It was a fine run, one of my favorite of these little 'zines.

In 2008 there were 12 short stories, two of them short-shorts, about 37,000 words total. By my count, three of the stories were short-shorts. In addition to the stories, Flytrap had a featured poet each issue, Catherynne M. Valente in #9 and, of all people, National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia in #10. Gioia is apparently a supporter of genre fiction -- he's also a first-rate poet. (Mostly in "new formal" modes.) I was delighted to see a selection of his poems, which were very good. (Valente is one of my favorite writers of what might be called poetic prose, but oddly I feel her poetry less successful in that sense than her prose -- not that her contributions weren't fine.)

From #9 my favorite story was Jenn Reese's "Monstrous Love", an amusing tale set at Bullfinch High -- a school for mythological creatures --here Galatea’s son (made of stone, natch) befriends Medusa -- you can guess why they are compatible. From #10 I really liked T. F. Davenport's "Moth's Flame", an SF story encompassing a sort of myth about a planet where time dilation increases as you get closer to the surface. Also Alex Wilson's "Chance of Snow", a nicely structured story about falling in love with a snow woman. Other good work came from Greg Van Eekhout, Haddayr Copley-Woods, and M. K. Hobson (and really all the other contributors -- I enjoyed to some extent every story this year).

Gender Balance count: 8 of 12 stories this year were by women, or about 67%. Last year the numbers were 5 of 11, or 45%. As with a couple other publications this year, one issue was all-women. (One might well ask, I suppose, why that is worthy of notice, when it used to be almost standard, and is still not uncommon, for an issue of a magazine to be all-men. I note that in some cases the editors call particular attention to the all-female nature of an issue -- in the case of Flytrap #9, however, Heather and Tim mentioned only noticing that fact after the TOC was put together -- that said, it was an all-invitation issue.)

SF/Fantasy split: I think 4 of the 12 stories (33%) could be called SF.
 

Tags: 2008, magazines, yearly summaries