From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:43:23 2004 Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 16:40:14 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Summary: DNA Publications, 2003 Summary: DNA Publications, 2003 DNA publications produces five fiction magazines: Weird Tales (which I have already covered), Dreams of Decadence (which I don't read -- sorry, but a magazine entirely devoted to vampire fiction simply doesn't hold any appeal to me), Fantastic, H. P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, and Absolute Magnitude. In addition, they have some involvement with Artemis. (Warren Lapine is listed as Assistant Publisher/Distributor, and the magazine is "published in association with DNA Publications".) I sent in a subscription check for HPL's Magazine, but I haven't seen a copy yet. So this post will cover Fantastic, AbMag, and Artemis. Once again, the fiction side struggled terribly this year. The magazines are all on a nominal quarterly schedule, and each of the three put out only one issue this year. This is not a good thing, especially as this sort of irregularity has been the rule for a couple years now. I'll note the possibility of another issue showing up in my mailbox soon, which would hardly remedy things. The one issue of Fantastic (Summer) had 4 stories, one long novella and 3 shorts, which added up to about 46,000 words of fiction. I was not impressed by any of the stories, and I was particularly disappointed by the novella, "Gravesend", by Tom Piccirilli. Piccirilli is a decent writer who has done some solid stuff, but this story was just dire. The one issue of Absolute Magnitude (Summer) featured 3 short stories and two novelettes for a total of 33,000 words of fiction. Nothing particularly outstanding, though on the whole a tolerable issue. Best were the novellas: a competent space industry story by Ben Bova, and a competent adventure story by Chris Bunch. Artemis in its Winter issue featured 6 short stories totaling about 21,000 words of fiction. As ever, Artemis also featured a lot of space-oriented non-fiction. Again, nothing spectacular, some decent stories, the best perhaps being a rather fun, light, story by Cat Darensbourg, "Jigsaw-Bubblegum", about two teens getting up to no good.