Far-Flung Fiction!
Hello! Welcome to TQF#17! This last couple of months have been very exciting for us, not least because TQF#16 was downloaded over 600 times! Not a lot by some standards, but for us it was flabbergasting. My flabbers are gasted through and through. It's very exciting, yet rather frightening, too – people are actually going to look at our work, and judge it.
When putting together earlier issues I had no such fear, and gambolled about in blithe idiocy. Still, don’t think we’ve buckled under the pressure! Quite the opposite: we’ve thrived! For one thing, those extra eyeballs have led to extra submissions, and the extra submissions have led to extra pages!
Seeing all those eyeballs rolling in the direction of this issue made me think this might be a good time to put together a manifesto of some kind, to explain what the magazine’s all about. It’s important, for example, for potential contributors to understand that this is not, in many ways, a respectable magazine, and it doesn’t have a very respectable history… After all, it was originally set up with the express intention of exploiting the handful of authors I already had in my pocket (myself among them), and even now, when it publishes authors I have to treat with a bit more respect, it is still rather ruthless, at least in its determination to keep going!
So, what have we got for you in this issue? Which authors have sacrificed their reputations in order to bulk up our page count? As ever, of course, like it or not, there are further instalments in the Saturation Point Saga (by Howard Phillips), the researches of Newton Braddell (by John Greenwood), Helen and Her Magic Cat (by Steven Gilligan), and After All (by Michael Wyndham Thomas).
Cronies and indentured servants aside, Diane Andrews, new to these pages, calculates for us “The Speed of Darke”. In a strange world of filtered legend, recently delivered from the rule of the mysterious Monckes, life tries to go on.
When Richard K Lyon sent me the story of “The Christmas Present War”, a quick google revealed him to have collaborated with Andrew J Offutt on a series of novels. Given that I only had to look up from my monitor to see novels by the collaborator in question, the story was as good as accepted before I even read it. Thankfully, once I did read it, the story didn’t let me down.
Jeff Crouch has provided us with “Glurp”, the first story accepted for this issue. Like the substance in its title, this story stuck with me after my first reading of it, and I felt an uncontrollable compulsion to send the author an acceptance note. It might be wise to lock your valuables in a safety deposit box before you proceed, just in case the author has woven some strange, malignant science into his story’s telling that might force you, too, to do his bidding.
Sometimes I read and accept stories late at night, at times when I should really be sleeping. How else to explain the appearance in this serious and august journal of such a lunatic item as Dan Kopcow’s “Gone English”, a tale of the Bearded Avenger? Then again, it does remind me of Grant Morrison and Simon Louvish, a combination which will usually add up to an instant acceptance from these parts!
I hope you enjoy this issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together!– SWT
Editorial
Far-Flung Fiction!
News
Monster Invasion? ~ The TQF Manifesto
The Saturation Point Saga: The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta
Howard Phillips
The Morning After ~ The Doomed Mission ~ A Fight to the Death! ~ Howard Needs Help! ~ The First Night of the Great Big Fear ~ Howard’s Grand Performance ~ Gonna Roll the Bones! ~ The Creature Attacks ~ Attack from Beneath the Waves! ~ The Dusty Waters ~ Things Get Worse ~ The Doom of Howard Phillips ~ The Ultimate Fate of Sea Base Delta ~ A New Note or Two ~ Return to Danger! ~ My Greatest American Adventures
The Speed of Darke
Diane Andrews
Gone English
Dan Kopcow
The Christmas Present War
Richard K Lyon
Glurp
Jeff Crouch
After All
Riddle-Me-Ree
Michael Wyndham Thomas
Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown
Death and Rebirth
John Greenwood
The Quarterly Review
Earth Defence Force 2017 ~ The Last Mimzy ~ Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Obituary
Steven Gilligan (1973–2007)
Helen and Her Magic Cat
Steven Gilligan
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