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Eidolon is a beefy journal, printed on good quality stock with striking, full-color cover art. This is not your father's science fiction quarterly. 

The stories in volume 25/26 were a literary can of whoop-ass. "Lucent Carbon," by Russell Blackford, is a hard, gleaming jewel -- his characters seem to pop off the page. This is also the best story about the uploading of human identities into a databank to come along in a good long while. 

"The Dark Under the Skin", by Dirk Strasser, is a sensitive and superb tale laced with Aboriginal mythos, the longing for spiritual understanding, and the use of art to yoke disparate people and communities. 

The funniest story is "Bestseller," by Stephen Dedman -- it provides the funniest take on the Bible, and especially the Revelation of St. John, that I've ever had the pleasure to read.

And, for those of you who like your heavy-duty science articles, Eidolon has that too. Greg Egan's Foundations piece on Special Relativity left my head swimming in theorems and mathematical symbols. 

Eidolon is a great journal -- my only complaint is that they only put out four issues a year.

Thomas Myer is a technical writer with Cisco Systems, Inc. He divides his time between reading, writing, and doing research. He can also make a game of pool interesting.