Till there's only the tickets and crows here

[sovay]

I see that Pluto has been punted—back to the underworld with you. I wonder how Venetia Burney feels.

It's that time of year again: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror has come out. lesser_celery has already listed the honorable mentions for Not One of Us; time_shark has done the same for Mythic Delirium. I have not yet seen a copy of the latest collection for myself, but I've been reliably informed that I have fourteen honorable mentions:

"A Ceiling of Amber, A Pavement of Pearl," Singing Innocence and Experience
"Asleep at Fortune's Wheel," Zahir #6
"By Sunlight," Clarity
"Doyna for August, and After" (poem), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens
"Etemmu" (poem), The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 7.1
"Gintaras" (poem), Dreams and Nightmares #70
"Growing Season" (poem), The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 7.3
"In Sight of the Seasons" (poem), Not One of Us #34
"Little Fix of Friction," Not One of Us #33
"Psyche" (poem), Not One of Us #33
"Salt and No Wounds" (poem), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens
"Tarot in the Dungeon" (poem), Mythic Delirium #12
"The White Swan," TEL: Stories
"Time May Be," Singing Innocence and Experience

All the editors who accepted and published these pieces, thank you! This sort of makes me need to readjust my head.

And write something for Pluto.

Comments

[sovay]

It seems very, very odd to think of the planets w/o it!

It really is. I am at the moment re-reading Eleanor Cameron's A Mystery for Mr. Bass (1960) and I ran across this passage:

For upon that wall, which was made of numberless blocks of stone fitted carefully together, was a carving. And this carving was so finely and deeply cut, the colors that filled in the picture were so rich and vivid, that there could be no mistaking what it was.

It was a sun, a big flaring sun with rays. And though, in places, large patches of green mold had spread across the wall, it could still be seen that, ranged around the sun in different orbits, were eight planets.

The sun and its rays were gold, as if gold dust had been worked into the very surface of the stone. The smallest sphere, plainly Mercury, in an orbit nearest the sun, was a deep red. Then came a yellow Venus as if to show that this is the brightest of the planets. Next was a lapis-lazuli blue earth with a white moon and a tiny blue-green Basidium; then came an orange Mars; next, a pale, huge, silvery Jupiter with a red jewel of Basidium set into it to indicate the Great Red Spot; then a pale yellow Saturn with green and blue and red rings; and last of all a great green Uranus and a greater green Neptune.

There it was, a magnificent, richly colored, quite accurate picture of the solar system—except for the absence of little Pluto. Then David saw it: still another, outer orbit traced in gold, and, only a bit of it showing beneath a fan of fungus—what must have been the remotest planet. David broke the fungus away and rubbed the stone clear with his hand, and yes, there was Pluto. It could have been nothing else.

Sigh.