What contributors did next #3

John Greenwood, TQF co-editor, has begun to submit stories elsewhere. "Consumer Testing" appears in Bourbon Penn #7 and "Didcotts" appears in the forthcoming Rustblind and Silverbright, edited by David Rix and published by Eibonvale Press.

Bruce Hesselbach, who all the way back in 2007 contributed three stories to our magazine, has a new steampunk novel out from Cogwheel Press, Perpetual Motion.

The Not Yet by Moira Crone, which I reviewed for Interzone #240, reached the shortlist of the Philip K. Dick Award. Very interesting novel, well worth a look.

I have a review of Jad Smith's book John Brunner in Interzone #245, and the new Interzone #247 includes my review of Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe.

David Tallerman has a second Easie Damasco novel out, Crown Thief, with Prince Thief due this October.

Douglas Thompson has published Entanglement via Elsewhen Press.

While I'm here, apologies for the quietness on the blog this past month. I've been reading TQF cover artist Howard Watts' as yet unpublished (and very good) novel Master of Clouds and submissions for our next issue, so I haven't read much for review, while work and other responsibilities have kept me from blogging. But new reviews and a new issue are coming soon, so hang in there!

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20

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The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

So this is it for another year – our fourth year of issues (even if it’s only been three and a bit years since the first came out). I’d love to say that this has been a great year for Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, because in many ways it has. Our downloads have increased immensely and even our print sales have gone up a bit. People are starting to hear about what we’re doing. Listings on places like www.duotrope.com, www.ralan.com and the AA Independent Press Guide have brought dozens of submissions to our inbox, and the stories which we have accepted have enriched the magazine in every way. But I can’t bring myself to say it’s been a great year when it was the year our best friend died, leaving us utterly shaken. He’d spent Christmas with my family for something like the last six years, and while that sadly reflects the fact that he never managed to find someone special to create his own Christmases with, they were always good times, and it’s hard to face this one without him around. Apart from anything else, he nearly always bought superb presents for me. (Last year it was The Lurker in the Lobby, a fascinating overview of Lovecraftian cinema.)

I won’t spend the whole editorial being sad, though. It is Christmas, after all, and however much I miss my friend, I’m in ecstatic anticipation of the new Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Marks & Spencers pre-cooked turkey crown in the fridge looks as delicious as it does every year!

In this issue we have the first portion of a new novel by my co-editor, John Greenwood. I made him co-editor in recognition of the fact that he was writing half the magazine at the time – it would be unfair to reject his work now to avoid accusations of bias! And why avoid those accusations? I am biased, no doubt about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that with this novel, as perhaps with his Newton Braddell series, John is pandering to me somewhat, since he packs into each of them everything I want to read whenever I pick up a book (rare as that tends to be nowadays). It’s as if he has made a careful study of my literary tastes and preferences and custom-written a novel to entertain me. The Hatchling is his paciest, most thrilling and most atmospheric piece of writing to date, and if I could get away with reprinting it in every issue from now to eternity I would.

Next, Bruce Hesselbach regales us with a Tale of Yxning, "Contrarieties". Like The Hatchling, this is a story that hits the nail of my tastes so squarely on the head that it is almost uncanny. And the last story of the issue is the concluding part of Michael Wyndham Thomas’s serial, After All, "A River. It Had to Be." It’s been a privilege to publish this fine serial in these unworthy pages.

To both authors I owe an apology (in addition to the one I owe Bruce for the appalling illustration of a plant pot falling on Yren Higbe’s head that marred the publication of his story in TQF#19). Michael Thomas’s serial appeared in all six issues this year, while Bruce Hesselbach’s Tales of Yxning appeared in three, and yet neither author has had the cover devoted to them. The first cover was a portmanteau covering all the stories in the issue (just one postage stamp-sized illustration related to After All), and the next two were devoted to Howard Phillips’ The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta. The fourth cover of the year featured a creature from the fabulous "Ananke" by Jeff Crook, and the fifth concerned "The Walled Garden", by Wayne Summers, not that anyone would have been able to tell, thanks to my lack of drawing ability. Then this sixth issue has a cover relating to The Hatchling. So that’s four out of six covers given over to our in-house writers, and that’s not at all fair.

The reason is that we knew way in advance what in-house material we had in hand, and once draft covers were drawn up, even though other material came in, I didn’t want to start over on the covers, out of sheer laziness!

In 2008 I’ll make much more of an effort in this regard: I’ve made a vow that none of the covers will be devoted to anything written by myself, John Greenwood or Howard Phillips (unless there is nothing else in the issue).

That brings me to something else that I don’t feel we’ve done particularly well this year: reviews of the books people have sent us. If you look at page 72 of this issue you’ll see my review of Test Drive by DJ Burnham, a book I did not finish reading. As a one-off that wouldn’t be too bad, but it follows similar non-reviews of DF Lewis’s Weirdmonger and Nemonymous #7 (aka Zencore!) in previous issues. For that matter I didn’t get very far through Apex #10 before writing a short review, and Apex #11 stands on my desk now, just as an interesting book by the name of Triangulations stands on my co-editor’s desk. It’s a bit of an embarrassing pattern. We just don’t get around to reading them. In the case of some books that are sent to us on spec, or that we’ve bought ourselves, I don’t feel too guilty, but in the case of something like Apex or Nemonymous where the author has offered review copies and we have specifically requested them, it’s very poor of us.

I can’t promise that we’ll do better next year. For one thing, what really interests me about other small press publications is their methods, philosophies and goals, rather than the stories within. I’m fascinated to see what people are doing, and love to think about the reasons they are doing it. But (and I doubt anyone will disagree) a reviewer should really read the book too! Another issue is that reading an entire book for review takes about as much work as proofreading an entire issue of TQF, and for me it often comes down to doing one or the other.

So while I can’t promise to write better reviews, I won’t ask people specifically to send us review copies, and I apologise to anyone I’ve asked to send us a review copy in the past. If you do send us review copies of your work, I think you’ve had fair warning of the poor quality reviewing you can expect! (For really good reviewing, visit the website of the excellent Whispers of Wickedness.)

So here’s to the end of a very exciting year for this flawed but good-hearted and tenacious magazine! Twenty issues down, but the next will be the best yet – because every issue is! – SWT

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Editorial

The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

The Hatchling: Post-Natal Paranoia

John Greenwood

An Inconvenient Inheritance * Tangling with Grunewald * The Subterranean Ministry * Abroad, Unarmed and Incommunicado * Another Road to Juliaca * An Audience with El Alcalde * The Prison Under the Lake * Night of the Lakemother

Tales of Yxning

Contrarieties

Bruce Hesselbach

After All

A River. It Had to Be.

Michael Wyndham Thomas

The Quarterly Review

Halo 3 * Test Drive

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #19

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Welcome to Halloween!

es a year should be specials of some kind, so that we can still justify calling the magazine a quarterly. This year, we’ve decided to have a Halloween special. Luckily, we had some suitably scary submissions! “Pumpkin Jack” is the most appropriate, for obvious reasons, and so that’s where we begin the issue. It’s a story by Laura Bickle, about the discoveries a pair of bored teenagers make in and around their grandma’s isolated home. I’m not totally familiar with the way that pumpkins grow in real life, but there’s definitely something strange about these ones!

Next, Wayne Summers asks us to climb into “The Walled Garden”, if we dare. I don’t want to spoil his surprises, so I won’t say much more than that, other than to note how good it is to read that Henrick’s is still a going concern after that terrible incident with the shop window dummies a few years ago.

Something we’ve done differently in this issue is to divide the stories up – very roughly (some may even have been bruised in the process) – into sections. In the past it wasn’t really necessary, with most issues just being one long chunk of nonsense from me, but with more and more stories appearing in each issue, it started to seem like we’d be doing readers a favour if we made them a bit easier to navigate. So after the calendar-friendly fright section we segue into our series of fantasy stories!

I’ll note up front that our first fantasy story, “Rural Legend”, by Eric R Lowther, features horses and wolves, just like “Winter’s Warm Blood” in TQF18. It’s an unfortunate coincidence, but both stories were too good to reject on that account alone, and in any case I think we’re on a run of something like nineteen issues in a row featuring robot stories – a mere two sets of wolves and horses seems half-hearted in comparison! This is a great story that takes its time to draw you in, and is as much of a gentle giant as its protagonist. It’s a story that pats you on the back and says, “You ain’t doing so bad. Just keep on trying your best, and keep on trying to make your best better.”

“The Iron Mercenary” is a piece of heroic fantasy in the classic mould by Richard K Lyon and Andrew J Offutt. It is a continuation of their Tiana series, which saw publication as a series of three paperbacks in the late seventies and early eighties. I think this is this story’s first publication, but it dates from that period, a time before fantasy became a sub-set of the airport novel and Tolkein’s influence pushed Howard’s into the toilets and gave it a solid thrashing.

Andrew J Offutt of course has had a long career in writing, but when I hear his name it means one thing to me: My Lord Barbarian, the cover of which earned me much kudos at middle school by virtue of its buxom heroine, her virtues bare save for some tasteful bits of tin over her nipples. (Sadly I can only find the US cover on the internet, which while nice enough in itself lacks that important nostalgia factor!) I can only imagine what I would have made of Andrew’s Spaceways series at that age, and look forward to discovering what I'll make of it at my current age!

“When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine” is from Sam Leng. Saying anything more would give it all away, because it is only a slip of a thing! In the interests of driving readers to our competition, I should mention that Sam has a literary undertaking of her own (her webzine can be read at www.neonbeam.org.

Rounding out this impressive fantasy section is the second of the Tales of Yxning from Bruce Hesselbach. This one details “The Remarkable Life of Yren Higbe”, a character who made a brief but intriguing appearance in the first story, “The Tragical History of Weebly Pumrod, Witch Hunter”. The stories intersect, but stand alone, so if you have yet to acquire your copy of TQF#18, don’t be put off!

Our inaugural science fiction section contains “The Broadest Divide”, by David McGillveray. It’s an interesting story, in that your view of it – as to whether it is depressing or uplifting – will probably depend on whose side you would take. David doesn’t tell you who is right or who is wrong. The chances are even.

I noticed a David McGillveray among the credits in the film section of the Radio Times. Could it be the same man? His biography makes no mention of the fact, and being somewhat star-struck I dared not ask about it! Also, if I knew one way or the other would I feel honour-bound to berate him each time I felt a reviewer had completely missed the point of the latest Adam Sandler/Happy Madison movie, as is so often the case (though to be fair the Sandler reviews in RT have been moving in the right direction in recent years)?

“Who Picked the Pope’s Nose?” by Dan Kopcow doesn’t strictly fit our remit – there is no fantasy element (so my embarrassed apologies to anyone whose stories I have rejected solely on that account), and it isn’t all that adventuresome. But he was kind enough to let us publish one of his previous stories, “The Bearded Avenger”, and this one too tickled my fancy, so I indulged myself. Not knowing which pigeonhole to shove it into, I remembered hearing about some new-fangled type of writing called Bizarro.

Wow, longest editorial ever! There’s no room left to talk about the way this issue has a green cover, just like the previous one!

As usual, I’m going to end up giving unfairly short shrift to our returning features, “After All”, by “Magnificent” Mike Thomas, and “Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown”, by John “Jackanory” Greenwood, and that’s unfair, because they’re the rock upon which year four of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction has been built. They deserve all the gratitude I have to give, and they have it! – SWT

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Editorial

Welcome to Halloween!

News

Birmingham Town Hall

Horror

Pumpkin Jack

Laura Bickle

The Walled Garden

Wayne Summers

Fantasy

Rural Legend

Eric R Lowther

The Iron Mercenary: A Tale of Tiana

Richard K Lyon & Andrew J Offutt

When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine

Sam Leng

The Remarkable Life of Yren Higbe

Bruce Hesselbach

Science Fiction

The Broadest Divide

David McGillveray

Bizarro

Who Picked the Pope’s Nose?

Dan Kopcow

After All

An Old Trick… a Brief, Derisive Snort

Michael Wyndham Thomas

Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown

A Detour

John Greenwood

The Quarterly Review

Zencore!

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #18

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The Ever-Expanding Magazine That Exists at the Centre of the Universe

You’ll have to excuse the long title – it helped to balance up the contents page! Makes little sense here on the web, but never mind.

I’m so glad to welcome you to another issue of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction – the rock just won’t stop! It’s been such a thrill for me to publish every issue of this magazine – especially the ones containing my own writings, of course! This issue, however, contains nothing I have written except this editorial and a single page of reviews. Even the news items this time around were produced by my marvellous co-editor, John Greenwood, who also took care of the illustrative duties. On one hand, I feel a bit sad – this is my domain, and all these authors are trespassers! On the other hand, I’m happy, because my little magazine is starting to grow up. Before long, I’m going to find it hard to justify including my own novels and stories, and will probably be forced to launch a new magazine. Maybe I could call it something like Theaker’s Own. That sounds pretty good, actually!

Anyway, there are a lot of stories to run through, so let’s get going. The issue kicks off with our lead story, the excellent “Ananke”, by Jeff Crook. It’s fantasy in the high style, and so very precisely what I was asking for when I asked for submissions along the lines of a Conan, Elric or Gotrek and Felix novella that it’s hard to believe Jeff isn’t looking to gain some kind of leverage over me.

“Winter’s Warm Blood” by Mark E Deloy is a horror story with an unusually warm, feminine side. In this story, success isn’t destroying the enemy, it’s protecting the child of a fellow woman, regardless of her species.

In contrast, “Live to Be Hunted” by Sean & Craig Davis is 100% masculine, a bruising tale of a bruiser being tailed. Who’s on his tail? Will he get any (tail)? Where's the beef? Right here!

Michael McNichols takes us to “Glimmerick”, where he tells a delicate and eccentric story of a survivor waiting for disaster to strike once more. Should he run, or face it with his new friends? Perhaps he should consult the magical tree of god for advice on the matter! That’s definitely what I would do!

Everyone has gone pirate-crazy these last few years, and Benjamin Sperduto is no exception. “La Tierra de la Sangre” takes us into a world where the evil, repressive English Navy uses sorcery to pursue pure-hearted pirates across the high seas. I’m not sure Benjamin realised TQF is an English magazine – and a law-abiding one at that! I’m rooting for the Navy!

In “The Tragical History of Weebly Pumrod, Witch Hunter”, Bruce Hesselbach delivers a cross-section of his world of Yxning, a world where magic leads to wonderment and annoyance in equal measure!

The After All of Michael Wyndham Thomas returns for its antepenultimate engagement. Try not to misread the sub-title!

At the end, I get very excited about the Transformers movie, but just before that, Newton Braddell continues his merry adventures with his maudlin friends! – SWT

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Editorial

The Ever-Expanding Magazine That Exists at the Centre of the Universe

News

For She Is the Anointed One! ~ Middle-Aged Scientists Come to Middle-Aged Conclusions! ~ Carrier Bag Decision Made by Birmingham Family at Wit’s End

Ananke

Jeff Crook

Chapter 1  ~ Chapter 2  ~ Chapter 3  ~ Chapter 4  ~ Chapter 5  ~ Chapter 6  ~ Chapter 7  ~ Chapter 8

Winter’s Warm Blood

Mark E Deloy

Live to Be Hunted

Sean & Craig Davis

Glimmerick

Michael McNichols

La Tierra de la Sangre

Benjamin Sperduto

Tales of Yxning

The Tragical History of Weebly Pumrod, Witch Hunter

Bruce Hesselbach

After All

Some Huge Great Shunt-Yard

Michael Wyndham Thomas

Newton Braddell And His Inconclusive Researches Into The Unknown

A Timid Poet

John Greenwood

The Quarterly Review

Transformers ~ Apex #10

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan