Æon Speculative Fiction
Entry updated 14 December 2017. Tagged: Publication.
US downloadable Online Magazine which began as a Semiprozine but paid professional word rates for its last two issues. It was published and edited by mother and daughter Bridget and Marti McKenna, initially through Scorpius Digital in Seattle, Washington and, from issue #7 by Quintamid, Seattle. It ran for 14 quarterly issues (missing only February 2007) from November 2004 to May 2008. The unpublished fifteenth issue and other stories remaining in the inventory eventually appeared as End of an Æon (anth 2011) edited by Bridget and Marti McKenna. Unlike most online magazines at the time, which could be read directly online, Æon could only be downloaded as an ebook, with no prior access to content. This may have restricted sales as these were usually only a few hundred per issue.
The magazine's remit was to publish speculative fiction of all kinds, including science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and horror and even with those stories that are essentially traditional science fiction, there is still a sense of the unreal and fantastic, such as in "One Small Step" (August 2006 #8) by Ken Scholes, which the author regarded as a fable, where chimps with enhanced intelligence (see Apes as Human; Uplift) used as slave labour on the Moon, rebel. Most of the short fiction was new but there were a few reprints, such as Talk of Mandrakes (November 2004; 2003 chap) by Gene Wolfe in the first issue. Contributors included Steven R Boyett, Jaine Fenn, Howard V Hendrix, Liz Holliday, Kij Johnson, Jay Lake, David D Levine, Bruce McAllister, Dana William Paxson, Ken Rand, Ekaterina Sedia and Lavie Tidhar. There was also a regular column, "Signals", by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. [MA]
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