Lately I’ve been noticing clicks on an outgoing link to Amazon from my site to a . . . well, a spear. I was baffled, really, as I didn’t remember linking to Cold Steel’s assegai in any posts — and if I had wanted to demonstrate what an assegai was, for instance in a review of Imaro or something, I would have linked to wikipedia, and not a modern reproduction.

However, I was recently shopping for a stout walking stick — something to keep the dogs and orcs at bay during my morning walks. I remember sharing links with a friend about which models I might buy . . . and I had a vague recollection of my selections escalating in absurdity up through war clubs and tomahawks until I was suggesting that perhaps a spear would be the best dog-defense.

Somehow, when I was intending to put a link to my story in the latest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, ‘The Last of His Kind‘ (which got a great review here), I put in the link to the spear. And didn’t notice. So, whenever I kept seeing people following the link to the assegai I kept hunting around my site, wondering what on earth had prompted me to link to it in the first place. So, for anyone that wondered if maybe they had missed the punchline to that particular joke . . . it was just me goofing up.

I also fixed a dead link to ‘20,000 Light Years to Lilliput‘ at Darwin’s Evolutions, which is a story that not only has a mild rejuvenative effect on the reader, but has been shown to partially reverse male pattern baldness.

With all the market closings that have been going on lately, it’s nice to see some good news in the form of a resurrection. Darwin’s Evolutions, a magazine I had the good fortune to have a story in, ran into some trouble a while ago and shut down. Now it’s back with a new blogsite format as a ezine and, what do you know, they’ve just put up my story 20,000 Light Years to Lilliput today.

All of the content from the original issues of the magazine will go on site before new fiction appears, but Evolutions will open back up for submissions soon. I talked about issue one and issue two of DE on this blog, and both had solid line-ups of science fiction and fantasy stories and features. It’s great to see a magazine with such promise get a second chance.

The first thing you notice about issue two of Darwin’s Evolutions — and I’m sure you’ve noticed it already — is just how flipping amazing the cover is. Like the first issue, Darwin’s Evolutions has produced a magazine cover that can be judged alongside the best professional markets out there — and one can only hope that Darwin’s Evolutions will one day find its way onto newstands where such alluring images can work their magic.

This is the first issue of Darwin’s Evolutions I’ve read as a paper-and-staples real-life magazine and not a .pdf on a backlit computer screen, and the experience is much improved. Filled with great art and a variety of things to gawk at like a comic and big images of books and manga, it’s a stimulating ‘zine with an appealing layout.

But it’s the stories you want to know about, and Darwin’s Evolutions again does a great job of selecting an eclectic mix of science fiction that is just a bit skewed away from the typical. There’s C. Mitchell O’Neal’s near future juxtaposition of theosophy and genetics ‘The Angels of St. Ambrose,’ and the hauntingly off-kilter holographic ghost tale ‘Ghost Chimes’ by Nancy Fulda. Other stories feature a tense action SF piece, a tale of an AI dog and his programmer, and even a vampire on another world. Fusion and cross-genre scrambling seem to be the order of the day for Darwin’s Evolutions # 2, producing a combination of stories that work very well together.

Click here for Darwin’s Evolutions Issue 2 at Lulu, and choose either the free .pdf or hardcopy

Of course, there’s at least one more story I didn’t mention, a far-future peice told by a slangy spacer that tells of his crew’s encounter with a mysterious castaway entitled ’20,000 Light Years to Lilliput.’ I was rather impressed with it, if I do say so myself.

The debut issue of Darwin’s Evolutions just went online and it’s a promising premier. It’s got a great depth to it already, with fiction, articles, and graphic content as well as interviews, reviews, and an artist spotlight. The focus is on genre fiction, but the boundaries of genre are stretched by the sheer variety of the offerings, from articles for writers to manga reviews to a profile of a free fiction site to, of course, some genre-bending speculative fiction. In his editorial, Darwin Garrison lays out his simple requirements for Evolutions‘ fiction as follows: “. . . stories should be selected by how entertaining they are, not by some obscure literary standard or politically correct issue-content benchmark.” I couldn’t agree more.

Click here for Darwin’s Evolutions #1

With great art and design, huge breadth of variety, and a fun philosophy toward content, Darwin’s Evolutions is an online magazine to keep an eye on.