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Summary: Challenging Destiny, 2004
This year Challenging Destiny went to electronic publication, through Fictionwise. I really regret the lost of a print magazine (and a rather attractive one at that). I do understand the savings in production costs. (Alas that Fictionwise ebooks are not printable!)
This is a twice-yearly Canadian magazine, edited by David M. Switzer. I saw issues #18 and #18, June and December 2004, the only two issues of the year. There were 11 stories, two of them novelettes, for a total of about 65,000 words. Both novelettes were nice. From June, Jay Lake's "Benedice Te" is set in a sort of steampunkish alternate history, in Texas, where a British agent must deal with a stolen privy report -- and possibly evidence of something more sinister. The story features a zeppelin -- making me wonder if it wasn't inspired by Lake's co-editing of the fine new anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. (It would have fit that book just fine but I suppose Jay couldn't include one of his own stories.) From December, Stella Evans's "Ex Libris" is a fantasy PI tale, in which the detective must find a lost "Wizard's Library" -- the problem is, Wizard's Libraries are enchanted to appear as some other object.
Of the June short stories, my favorite was L. Blunt Jackson's "Early Adopters", about a new Neural Interface for brain augmentation. In December, I liked Steven Mohan, Jr.'s "Last Request", an end of the world story; and Marissa K. Lingen's "Anna's Implants", set on a planet where everyone gets implants of past artists, with the idea of enhancing their artistic abilities.
In sum, this was a pretty good year for the fiction in Challenging Destiny.
