From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:48:04 2004 Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:32:34 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Re: Summary: Challenging Destiny, 2003 On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:06:01 -0600, Rich Horton wrote: Oooooops! Here's the intended post: Summary: Challenging Destiny, 2003 I covered one issue of this magazine previously, but the latest issue, #17, for December 2003, just showed up, so I figure the magazine deserves an entry of its own. This is a Canadian magazine, edited by David M. Switzer. I saw issues #16 and #17, June and December 2003, the only two issues of the year (as planned -- it's a twice-yearly magazine). 10 stories, three of them novelettes (and one short story of 7400 words and another of 7300 by my count, which could easily be off by one or two hundred words), for a total of about 67,000 words. No really brilliant stories. The three longer stories in the June issue were all pretty decent: an amusing space medicine story by Uncle River, "General Density"; a sad story of misunderstanding aliens by A. R. Morlan, "Etamin at East 47th"; and nicely exotic fantasy artform story, "Soothe the Savage Beast" by Michael R. Martin. From December my favorite was William McIntosh's "Faller", about a man who parachutes off a floating city and discovers that his world is composed of any number of floating cities. I also liked Fraser Sherman's "Jack Be Nimble", in which a descendant of the Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk has rather more mundane ambitions, eventually including organizing a union among the slaves of goblins -- pretty funny stuff.