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Summary: Fantastic, 2005
Fantastic: Stories of the Imagination is edited by Edward McFadden. It was formerly (some years ago) known as Pirate Writings. The publisher is Warren Lapine of DNA Publishing. The magazine has been rather limping along for the past few years, managing an issue or two a year. I hope that next year will be better -- Warren Lapine's Kiss magazine is now up and going fairly well, it seems, which may improve things for DNA in general.
The Winter 2005 issue is, I presume, the only 2005 issue. There are signs that it has been prepared for a while, most notably the fact that the blurb for Chris Bunch's story does not mention his death earlier this year. Also, M. L. Konett's story is blurbed "her first professional publication", which might depend on your definition of professional, but I've seen stories from her at least in Strange Horizons and in Say. At any rate, this issue includes 6 stories, about 30,000 words of fiction. All the stories are shorts by my count, though one is 7400 words, so it could easily really be a novelette. (Bunch's "The Drum".)
My favorite story was Charles M. Saplak's "The Syncretic Priest's Confession". This is set on a dangerous planet in a future where people are engineered to have certain religious beliefs, those that best suit them for whatever role the government wishes them to fill. The narrator is a clergyman of the Syncretic Consortium, charge with administering "conversions" as necessary. The action concerns an attack by huge, apparently intelligent, beetles after an aircar makes an emergency landing in the beetles' territory. The action is well enough done, but the interesting part of the story is the treatment of religious belief, including its effect on the Priest. Bunch's "The Drum" is not bad, about daring raid on occupied France during World War II, by a mysterious British naval officer -- the fantastic element, as it happens, is exactly the same idea used by Sheila Finch in her 2004 F&SF story "So Good a Day", also involving a mission to France during WWII, though quite a different mission.
The rest of the magazine was pretty fair as well -- indeed, as a whole I'd call this the best issue of Fantastic in some time.
