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Summary: Challenging Destiny, 2005
Challenging Destiny is available electronically through Fictionwise, in various formats. As I've said, I regret the loss of the old print version of Challenging Destiny, but the words are still fine. (And the magazine is still nicely presented.) Happily, Fictionwise now makes selected ebooks available in printable .pdf formats (depending, I believe, on the contract with the authors) -- and Challenging Destiny is printable (in .pdf format).
It is a Canadian magazine, edited by David M. Switzer, and it appears twice yearly. 2005 saw issues #20 and #21, June and December 2005. There were 12 stories, four of them novelettes, for a total of about 85,000 words.
My clear favorite among the novelettes is Jay Lake's "To Live Forever" (#21), set on a planet colonized by humans who then are forced to notice the aliens, called Children, who already live there. The Children animate the dead, and they insist that the humans leave, or stay with a condition: the Children will infect them so that they live forever, but all human children will be taken by the aliens. The bulk of the story is set a few hundred years hence, with a few humans trying to resist the aliens by the use of iron, an outlawed metal. I also enjoyed Hayden Trenholm's "The Case of the Twisted Coil", narrated by a famous fictional character, and featuring such famous historical characters as Edison and Tesla: the narrator, who is living as a hobo in New York, investigates a murder which is originally pinned on Tesla. The story is a bit of a mess, but it's kind of fun.
Of the short stories I particularly enjoyed Ian Creasey's "Lonesome Cosmogonist" (#20), which marries Googlewhacks, SETI, and a failing marriage quite movingly. Steven Mohan, Jr.'s "The Day the Zombies Came Walking Up Out of the Sea" (#21) is a funny concoction in which a seaside Oregon town reacts quite smoothly to a zombie invasion. Stories by Kenneth Mark Hoover and Uncle River were also quite interesting.
