Theaker's Quarterly Fiction: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #27

Sunday, 1 February 2009

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #27

TQF27 presents a marvellous novel in full: Operation 1848 by Mike Schultheiss! Plus two short stories: "Orchid Strangelove and the Kiss of the Taipan" by Sam Leng and "Lost Futures" by Cyril Simsa. The issue is rounded out with the usual half-baked reviews, news and editorial musings. A complete novel! Another brilliant cover! It must be Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #27!

I see this issue as the beginning of Phase III of this magazine. Phase I began with issue four (issues one to three were little more than mock-ups), our first proper issue. Phase II began with issue sixteen (our first printed via Lulu) or seventeen (our first external and international contributors). Phase III, I think, is marked by two things: the change to a paperback format, and the availability from publication on Feedbooks. Phase IV, of course, will involve lots and lots of ants.

Welcome to the first issue of our new-look Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction! The changes are cosmetic, to be honest: it’s still the same old TQF you’ve come to know and love, just in a single column and shaped like a book. Our approach is unchanged, although there may be fewer of my terrible illustrations, since I’m happier leaving the occasional blank space in a book.

The reason for the change was mainly to make for easier on-screen reading. I was putting the stories into a single-column format to proofread, because it’s tough to read three columns of text in a pdf, and I began to wonder why we put our theoretical readers to such difficulty.

Having thought about making the change, I realised that it would make typesetting each issue much easier. And it’s also going to let me (and you!) build up a lovely Silver Age bookshelf: TQF is the now the same shape and size as our forthcoming range of books.
If you've been in the habit of printing TQF out to read, this smaller size might lead to a bit of wasted paper. All is not lost, though – head over to Feedbooks and you can run off a customised pdf of this issue in whatever size and shape you prefer.

Another change is that we’ve now put a permanent logo on the cover. I’ve always enjoyed playing around with the layout, but looking at back issues I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d spent less time on the logo, the covers might have been substantially better overall.

There’s one further change, a consequence of the others: with all the extra pages comes a rise in printing costs. We’ve never sold very many copies via Lulu (understandably, when we give the magazine away free on the net), so we decided not to worry too much about the price of a printed copy going up a bit. We’ll be the main ones affected! So we've dropped the fixed cover price, and each issue will now be as cheap as we can make it. To balance the price rise a bit, we’ve lowered the prices of back issues to be as low as possible.

I forgot to note this in the editorial, but another novelty in this issue resulted from a writer complaining about us reviewing a book we hadn't finished… Of course, we had been completely open about that in the review (that was sort of crucial to the point being made…) but once someone's saying things like "one reviewer didn't even read the book" it could well make people question our integrity – and we can't have that, since it's all we've got. We may be lazy, inept, novice reviewers, but at least we're honest! So we've added an Also Received section at the end of the reviews, where we'll round up everything we've received for review, and note our comments about anything that we aren't ready to review in full.

Editorial

Good Reading in 2008, by Stephen Theaker

News & Comment

Richard K. Lyon (1933–2008)
Graham Joyce Writing for Doom 4
Dark Horizons – Issue 54
Doctor Who: We Got It Wrong!

Science Fiction

Operation 1848, by Mike Schultheiss
Lost Futures, by Cyril Simsa

Fantasy

Orchid Strangelove and the Kiss of the Taipan, by Sam Leng

The Quarterly Review

Books

The Age of Chaos: the Multiverse of Michael Moorcock
Armageddon 2419 A.D.
Badge of Infamy
Derai (Dumarest of Terra #2)
The Hub: Dangerous Territory
Planet of Mystery
The Rights of the Reader
Shakespeare Wrote for Money
Shrike

Comics

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus, Vol. 4
The Filth
JSA, Vol. 7: Princes of Darkness

Games

Fable II

Television

Dead Set
Fringe
Knight Rider

Here are the people who made this issue so enjoyable to put together…

Mike Schultheiss contributes an entire novel to this issue, “Operation 1848”, a follow-up to “Darwin’s Corridor” (TQF#22). It’s the “Demon Breed” to his “Trouble Tide”, and will thoroughly entertain anyone who enjoyed the previous story. He grew up in Grass Valley in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, but is currently trapped in Davis with a B.A. in Anthropology. His interests are many and eclectic: besides natural and human history he enjoys good coffee, Japanese and German beer, Australian wine, and English gin. His all-consuming ambition is to be a full-time novelist. (I’ve advised him therefore to stop giving his novels away!) He is currently working on the second draft of his vampire fantasy novel Blood Moon Queen. Befriend or stalk him online at facebook, where he prowls under the pseudonym Torbjorn Nordhagen.

Sam Leng lives in Yorkshire, England with Worzel Gummidge and a biscuit barrel. Her fiction has recently been published in Sinister Tales, 94 Creations and Bloody October. She will have more stories published in 2009, in Twisted Dreams and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica (Vol. 8). She publishes her own fiction and poetry magazine at www.neonbeam.org. To this issue she contributes a lengthy detective-romance-supernatural-library story about two-fisted matchmaker to the monsters Orchid Strangelove. Fingers crossed we’ll see Orchid return to these pages again one day.

Cyril Simsa is a British writer/translator, currently resident in Prague. He has published articles and translations in a variety of books and magazines, plus a rather smaller number of stories in the small press. His most recent credits have been stories in Premonitions and Starship Sofa, and an longish article in Faunus. To this issue he contributes “Lost Futures”, a Moorcockian tale of dimension-hoppers looking for purpose – or maybe it’s love.

R.L. Carter provided the astonishing artwork for this issue’s cover. If we’re not careful people are going to be tricked into thinking this is a real magazine! Go see his Deviantart gallery!

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. He wrote all of this issue’s reviews. He is also the editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society. He needed to think of something else to say about himself to fill the last few lines on the page, so... His album of 2008 was Third by Portishead. TV show: Doctor Who. Radio show: Adam & Joe. Comics: Savage Sword of Conan, Vols. 1–2.

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