Forthcoming Theaker

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #49 will be with you on Friday. (Sorry for the delay!) While you're waiting, here is information on three other forthcoming publications that feature my work, as well as the contributions of many other people whose names you may recognise:

Interzone #255: includes my review of a fascinating book of essays, Black and Brown Planets, edited by Isiah Lavender III, plus columns by Jonathan McCalmont and Nina Allan, a story by Thana Niveau, and much, much more.

Black Static #43: includes my review of The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood, as well as many, many more reviews by the peerless Peter Tennant, stories by Ralph Robert Moore, Andrew Hook and Aliya Whiteley, and loads more.

BFS Journal #13: will contain quite a few bits by me, thanks to a bit of a crisis at BFS Towers, including an interview with Lavie Tidhar, a piece going through the results of the BFS president's recent survey, an article about my experiences at FantasyCon 2014, and a round-up of responses from former BFS chairs to my questions about that hot seat. Almost two hundred pages of stories, poetry and articles! The link for this one will take you to the Join the BFS bit of the BFS website, because that's the only way you can get hold of this fine publication. I'll be sending it to press on November 17, more or less, so make sure you've joined by then to get onto the mailing list. The cover (selected by the outgoing editor) is by our own Howard Watts.

BFS Journal #11: out now!

Sorry that things have been so quiet on the TQF blog this year – paying work has been keeping me very busy (can’t and won’t complain!) but work is progressing on the next issue of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction – and about 25 reviews I have at various stages of unreadiness.

One distraction has been that I was asked to help out on the BFS Journal for a couple of issues after it had stalled, to give the new managing editor time to train up. You can only get this 184pp paperback if you’re a BFS member, but we’ve ordered a handful of extra copies, so if you join today there’s still a chance of getting it.

Sarah Newton is the editor of this issue’s fiction:

• The Switch, Mark Lewis
• Electricity, Gary Couzens
• Pawnarchy, Mark Huntley-James
• The Eden Paradigm, Allen Ashley and Madeleine Beresford
• A Barrow on the Border, Rima Devereaux
• The Need to Create, Emma Newman
• The Lost Name, Sandra Unerman
• Baby 17, Jonathan Oliver
• The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, M.E. Lerman

Stuart Douglas edits the non-fiction:

• Jennie Gyllblad, interviewed by Max Edwards
• Freda Warrington, interviewed by Alex Bardy
• The Adventures of Brak, Mike Barrett
• Tim Powers, interviewed by Stuart Douglas
• Nick Campbell on The Child Garden
• Forbidden Fruits, Ray Cluley

And Ian Hunter edits the poetry:

• Cybernetic Mary, Deborah Walker
• Protecting Veil, Megan Kerr
• A Paranormal Romance, Allen Ashley

There’s also a controversial editorial by Max Edwards, a controversial chairman’s chat by Mark Barrowcliffe, and a BFS news section that has not yet attracted any controversy (but maybe no one has read it yet). Cover art by Jennie Gyllblad.

BFS Journal #10, out soon

During January I helped out on organising and typesetting #10 of the BFS Journal. It’s one hundred and sixty-eight pages of fantasy fun, weirdness and even a dash of controversy, edited by Max Edwards, Sarah Newton, Stuart Douglas and Ian Hunter.

Contributors include Al Kratz, Allen Ashley, Anne Lyle, Anne Shah, Anton Sim, Cav Scott, Clare Le May, David Buchan, David Gullen, Erik T. Johnson, Gary Budgen, Jaine Fenn, James Barclay, Juliet Boyd, Juliet McKenna, Mark Barrowcliffe, Mike Chinn, Paul Magrs, Pye Parr, Richard Farren Barber, Stuart Douglas, Tammy O’Malley, Zoe Gilbert and frequent TQF contributor Douglas Thompson.

The cover art, originally from Blood and Feathers: Rebellion by Lou Morgan, is by Pye Parr, who is interviewed by Cavan Scott about his work on that and other books.

BFS periodicals aren’t generally available to non-members. However, we ordered 25 spares and they will be sent out to new members and renewals as long as stocks last, along with two BFS exclusive hardback anthologies, The Burning Circus and Unexpected Journeys, edited by Johnny Mains and Juliet McKenna respectively. Contributors to those books include Kate Elliott, Stephen Volk, Muriel Gray and Adam Nevill. Join here.

What contributors did next #2

Last April I interviewed Rhys Hughes for the British Fantasy Society’s journal. Due to production problems the journal wasn’t published until September, and Rhys finally received his contributor copy this month. All a bit frustrating, but the interview turned out well and Rhys blogs about it here.

Ace reviewer Jacob Edwards takes a turn as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine editor with #55, and includes fiction from Tom Holt, Stephen Gallagher, Deborah Kalin and Lisa A. Koosis, among others, as well as an interview with Glen Duncan and a “musical interlude” with Richard O’Brien. More details here.

David Tallerman’s novel Crown Thief is now out, a sequel to the very enjoyable Giant Thief (reviewed by me here), and a third in the series will follow soon. He’s written an interesting article on his late realisation that the first two books failed the Bechdel test: read it here.

(I realised a while ago that there was a similar problem with my Howard Phillips novels, and became quite maudlin till I realised it gave me an excellent plot for the fifth book. Well, I say excellent – excellent by the standards of my Howard Phillips novels..!)

Richard Ford, who contributed “Dead Gods” to Dark Horizons #55, has a new novel Herald of the Storm coming from Headline. It’ll be out in April this year. For more info see his blog: www.richard4ord.wordpress.com.

Our cover artist extraordinaire Howard Watts has set up a DeviantArt page, including some TQF cover pieces. Prints available! Here’s the link: http://hswatts.deviantart.com/

A few thoughts on BFS Journal #4

The new issue of the BFS Journal arrived in the post this week, looking very handsome in its Clive Barker cover art. I haven’t read any of the fiction yet (it generally takes me ages to get around to reading it all), so I won't review it properly, but here are my thoughts so far...

I’ve enjoyed David Riley’s seven Prisms (although I’m very pleased that his replacement will be Lou Morgan). For one thing, he’s published an awful lot of my writing! This issue’s Prism section, his last, has a solid seven pages by me (pages 57 to 63), all written at speed over a weekend thanks to a last minute deadline change.

Reading them now, they didn’t turn out too badly, although in my Game of Thrones review a reference to “the elegant tedium of a Carnivale” has been changed to “the elegant tedium of Carnivale”. A tiny change, but one that affected the sense of what I was saying a little bit (i.e. that I find most HBO dramas elegant but dull, not just Carnivale).

As usual a handful of mistakes caught my eye in the Prism reviews - “lead” for “led”, “Tolkein”, stuff like that. One or two reviewers seem to be pulling their punches, and some reviews spend a bit too long summarising the plot, but I enjoyed reading them all.

The highlight of Prism for me was Mark Morris’s account of writing a professional novel NaNoWriMo-style - I'd love to see more of this kind of thing in Prism. The ironic thing about the article is that Mark's adaptation of the game Dead Island, though written in a month, is likely to be better than the game, which took six years or so. (From the 3/10 review in Edge it sounds like a complete duffer.) John Probert’s column on retitling of movies is also an interesting one.

There are quite a lot of reprints in the Dark Horizons section (34 pages out of 60, I think), but it’s all new to me. I enjoyed the comic by Jay Eales and mpMANN (originally from The Girly Comic), but haven’t read the rest yet. Peter Coleborn, editor of the Dark Horizons section, has also stepped down - the Christmas issue of the Journal will be his last.

New Horizons editor Andrew Hook is also leaving, and the section is being allowed to fade into history. The material spread across the four issues of the BFS Journal so far would have been #6 and #7 of the standalone magazine, I think, which Andrew had been planning as his last for some time. I’ll miss his work with the BFS; I liked the fiction he published; but I understand why he’d want to spend more time on his own writing.

It’s not hard to see why New Horizons has been discontinued in the context of the journal - it made little sense having two separate fiction sections in the same magazine. On the other hand, New Horizons was originally introduced to spread the workload, so that each journal editor had six months between issues. I suspect the BFS might find it difficult to find a reliable editor to produce a decent-sized journal every three months.

I couldn’t have done it, not without putting TQF on hold. Although I produce TQF every three months, that’s my main hobby. The thing with the BFS is that almost everyone who volunteers is already doing something creative with their hobby time (writing, a zine, a small press, a blog, making films, etc), and then they have to find time for their BFS duties on top of that.

The BFS has also sent out this week Full Fathom Forty, a 500pp collection of fiction from BFS members and friends. Like Dark Horizons, it’s mostly reprint (27 or so out of 40 stories) but all are new to me. There are some very good contributors - e.g. Conrad Williams, Nina Allan, Robert Shearman, Cate Gardner, Christopher Fowler and Alison Littlewood - so I bet the anthology as a whole will be excellent.

BFS Journal #3 – coming soon

I'm not as involved with the BFS as I used to be – I went from doing eight or nine jobs for them to none in the space of six months (and by gum that made Mrs Theaker happy!) – but I'm still very excited about each new mailing.

The third issue of the BFS Journal has just been announced as coming out in late June. The line up, if you can't quite make it out on the cover, is as follows:

• Chairman’s Chat by David J Howe
• BFS News

PRISM:

• Editorial by David A. Riley
• Ramsey’s Rant by Ramsey Campbell
• Book Reviews edited by Jan Edwards and Craig Lockley
• Graphicky Quality edited by Jay Eales
• Media Reviews edited by Mathew F. Riley
• The Mark of Fear by Mark Morris
• Profondo Probert Column 5 by John Llewellyn Probert
• Mary Danby Interviewed

NEW HORIZONS:

• In The House of Answers by Allen Ashley
• Grey Magic For Cat Lovers by Jan Edwards
• The Sound Down By The Shore by Douglas J. Ogurek
• Beached by Eric Boman
• The Hawthorne Effect by Adrian Stumpp

DARK HORIZONS:

• Heaven & Helvetica by Gavin B. Nash
• Late in the Day by Adam Walter
• Mostly in Shadow: Lesser-known Writers of Weird Fiction, Part 2 by Mike Barrett
• Ten Things We’re Going to Have to Live Without After the Apocalypse by Allen Ashley
• The Pet Peeve by Rick Kleffel
• Cellar by J.R. Salling
• ‘Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite’ by Clint Smith
• A Guttering of Flickers by Michael Kelly
• The Secret in the Village of Dragonsbreath by Annie Neugebauer
• The Last Dance of Humphrey Bear by James Brogden

I'm very glad to see the return of the Chairman's Chat and BFS News to the journal – I do think it's good to have something in the mailing that makes us feel like members of a society rather than just subscribers to a magazine. (Although I remember struggling to find the time to write the three Chats of my brief but glorious reign!)

I'm a big fan of all the columns, especially The Mark of Fear, and I'm really happy to see a story from TQF contributor Douglas Ogurek in there. Mike Barrett's articles are never anything less than fascinating.

I only had one review ready in time for issue two of the journal (a scintillating piece on cine-classic Death Race 2), but I sent in seven for this issue:

• Doctor Who: The Paradise of Death (AudioGo)
• Doctor Who: The Perpetual Bond (Big Finish)
• Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction (AudioGo)
• Doctor Who: Cobwebs (Big Finish)
• Altitude (film)
• Shock Labyrinth 3D (film)
• The Gift of Joy, Ian Whates (NewCon)

Not sure how many of them will have made it in – the current BFS chair is a big fan of Doctor Who (and a very distinguished one!) but other members might find their patience tested by so many reviews of Doctor Who audio adventures!

As ever, if you want to get hold of this issue, there's only one way: join the BFS!

BFS Journal #1 – now going out to members!

The first issue of the new BFS Journal has been going out to members this week. If you're not a member, I believe there are a few copies in reserve, but join quickly or it'll be gone for good!

I'd been writing up to a quarter of some recent issues of Prism, but there's not as much as usual by me in this first combined publication; a combination of the deadline jumping forward and a bit of doubt about whether reviews would appear in the journal at all. But pages 93 to 97 of the journal are by me – all the dull BFS news! – and page 130, a review of Doctor Who: City of Spires.

Pages 62 to 87 print the runner-up and winner of the BFS Short Story Competition 2010, which I organised – "The Song" by Travis Heermann and "Omar, The Teller of Tales" by Robin Tompkins – but because of the way the competition works I haven't actually read them yet: I'm looking forward to that.

The journal certainly looks nice – unsurprisingly, if you spend twice as much on a publication, it looks twice as good! – but structurally it needs some work. It feels like three different publications stuck together between hard covers, which is exactly what it is. Giving the sections of a journal issue numbers seems redundant: we've already had a Dark Horizons #57, for one thing!

The next issue should be much better in that regard, this one having been pulled together in a rush. There's a lot of potential: once it settles down, and drops the pretence that it's three magazines rather than one, I think it will be very impressive. It's very handsome, nicely designed, and the full-page artwork looks brilliant. It feels very laid-back.

I haven't read much of it yet, but in Prism it seems very odd that David Riley has chosen to publish his review of Wine and Rank Poison under a pseudonym (or at least that's what I assumed – the comments are very similar to those made on his blog and on forums, and Ian Redfern is a pseudonym he's used in the past), but uses his own name for more positive reviews.

He's explained on the BFS forums that it was someone else using his pseudonym, making it an anonymous review, in which case it should have been printed as such (or not, which I think would be the decision of most editors), rather than being printed under a pseudonym to give it the cloak of respectability.

Giving books bad reviews isn't pleasant, and giving bad reviews to books by people you know is even worse, but if the reviewer doesn't respect their own opinions enough to stand by them, why would anyone else respect them? A grave misjudgment there by both reviewer and editor, if indeed they aren't one and the same.

On a more positive note, I enjoyed the interview with Kari Sperring – reading Living With Ghosts I was strongly reminded of Dumas, in particular La Reine Margot, by its images of people wandering through the streets of a city in chaos. I had no idea she was actually a Dumas scholar. Score one for me!

Six whole pages are given over to reprinting this ramble from Des Lewis's blog, which I expected to be annoyed by, but it worked very well in the context of a journal.

More comments when I've actually read it!