Conan Omnibus, Vol. 1: Birth of the Legend, by Kurt Busiek and chums (Dark Horse) | review

Conan is a burly, quick, strong and sharp fellow who wields a broadsword and wears a horned hat. He is a great thief, a great warrior, and eventually a leader of armies and a great king. He never gets the hang of magic, though, and over the years plays a pretty big part in ending its dominion over humanity. But that lies ahead. An unobtrusive framing device – a wazir reading tales of Conan to his prince in the distant future – takes us back to Conan’s birth, on the battlefield, after his pregnant mother Fialla rushes to help his father Conaldar. He is a month premature, but is still a very big baby. He already has a mean stare. To some extent, he is already the man he will grow up to be, even as a child. Rather than seeing him formed as he grows up, we see him revealed, through interactions with other children, adults, wild animals. He is as keen to learn as he is to fight. After bringing war upon his people, he leaves home, and then we see his first travels, with the traditional enemies of his people, and then being enslaved by the Hyperboreans.

This 456pp book collects issues 0 to 15, 23, 32, 45 and 46 of the monthly Conan series from Dark Horse. You can’t tell, however, which issue you are reading; a contents page would have been nice, or for issues to be separated by their original covers, or for artists to be credited for particular issues, but this format is standard for Dark Horse’s omnibus series, and probably appeals to people who just want the story without the apparatus. The artwork, by Greg Ruth for the early years, by Cary Nord and Thomas Yeates for the Hyperborean story, who are joined by Tom Mandrake for the third set of tales, is consistently magnificent. I’ve read that its distinctive visual style was produced by Dave Stewart and Greg Ruth applying the colour directly over pencils.


The book’s cover, by another artist altogether, undersells it, and led me to expect a glossier retread of the Marvel comics, but it’s meaty, smart, visceral and stylish. This is Conan at his best, not the lunkhead seen on the cover. He feels like a character, not just a fantasy. But it is a fantasy, of course, and there’s plenty of bedding beautiful women, none of whom seem to worry about getting pregnant. The lettering is worth a shout too, by Richard Starkings and Comicraft. There’s quite a lot of narration, and if that had appeared in a pseudo-handwritten font or (as in early issues of Savage Sword of Conan) something hard-to-read like thin white text on black backgrounds, it would have quickly become a chore. Instead, after the prologue, a typewriter font is used, as if the captions were torn from the manuscripts of Robert E. Howard. It’s easy to read and evocative of the pulps.


Dark Horse’s licence to publish Conan comics ends this year – if the rest is as good as this, they can look back on a job very well done. So frequently their licensed products don’t just live up to the source material, they outshine it. Much as I have loved what I’ve read of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword Sword of Conan, this is the best adaptation of Conan I’ve read. Volumes two to five are already available, with six and seven to follow later this year. Stephen Theaker ****

Waking in Winter, by Deborah Biancotti (PS Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

In this science fantasy novella, reminiscent in good ways of Whiteout or The Thing, Muir is working on an alien planet, part of a group of glacionauts working from the Base Station. She’s a couple of days away from going home, though she isn’t keen because her mother’s funeral awaits. On what would have been one of her last trips in her twin-seater flying Otter she sees something under the ice: a gigantic woman, a mermaid with a six-metre-wide tail and miles of hair. She assumes it’s been carved into the ice, but when other team members look at it they each see something different, something rooted in their own cultural heritage. No one wants to talk about it, and Muir doesn’t think it’s a good thing. When a colleague says he sees a lotus flower, “Muir felt something slip inside her. The beginning of an avalanche.” The book never lets us forget how cold it is there, so the reader understands very quickly how dangerous the situation could become. There are only two days until winter sets in, and it’s going to get dark, but her colleagues are keen to dig up what they can. As you might imagine, that’s a mistake. I enjoyed this a lot: it was frightening, and awe-inspiring, and very good at showing how co-workers who spend too much time together can wind each other up. Available here.  ****

UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2 (TQF63): now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

GUEST-EDITED BY DOUGLAS J. OGUREK

“Ghastly.” “Bloodthirsty.” “Transgressive.” “Over-the-top violence and sexual deviation.” So said the reviews of UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first official collection in the unsplatterpunk subgenre.

Now, seven goreslingers and propriety defilers have grossed up their game to deliver UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2. True to the unsplatterpunk subgenre, these stories deliver a moral message while shocking or repulsing the reader. The collection includes a foreword by criminologist, philosopher, and aesthetic commentator Rafe McGregor.

Returning contributor Drew Tapley kicks off the awfulness on an impressively juvenile note with the anthology's most straightforward story. In “First Kiss”, a high school student deals with an expulsive situation with as much stoicism as Conan the Barbarian… maybe “Barfbarian” is more relevant. Trophy hunting is Triffooper Saxelbax’s target as his protagonist, a designer of controversial augmented reality games, takes on the corporate obsession with teamwork in “The Villainy of Solitude”. Hugh Alsin’s satirical piece “Convention Hitler!” explores intolerance run amok when the story’s namesake attends a British horror convention. In “The Music of Zeddy Graves”, Stephen Theaker brings his planet-hopping duo of Rolnikov and Pelney to Melodia, whose inhabitants participate in an endless music festival, and whose main attraction goes to gruesome extremes to achieve her compositions. Douglas J. Ogurek’s “Gunkectomy” alternates between an embittered architect/author and a husband hunter who finds commercial and social value in her earwax. “The Tapestry of Roubaix” by Howard Phillips seems to come off the shelf of a nineteenth century library, until it reveals what the protagonist does in his washbasin. M.S. Swift, another returning contributor, closes out the collection with “The Bones of Old England”, an extravaganza of mania-induced carnage.

Delve deep into the cesspool that is UNSPLATTERPUNK! 2, and remember – sometimes to learn a lesson, you might have to get dirty.

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Here are the unsplattered contributors to this issue:

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonym for a writer living somewhere on Earth. Though banned on Mars, his fiction appears in over forty Earth publications. Ogurek founded the controversial literary subgenre known as unsplatterpunk, which uses splatterpunk conventions (e.g. extreme violence, gore, taboo subject matter) to deliver a positive message. He guest-edited Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: UNSPLATTERPUNK!, the first ever unsplatterpunk anthology. He also reviews films at that same ezine. Recent longer works include the young adult novel Branch Turner vs the Currants (World Castle Publishing) and the horror/suspense novella Encounter at an Abandoned Church (Scarlet Leaf Publishing). More at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com. Twitter: @unsplatter

Drew Tapley is a copywriter, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto.

Howard Phillips is the author of His Nerves Extruded, The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta and The Day the Moon Wept Blood.

Howard Watts provides the exceptional wraparound cover for this issue.

Hugh Alsin is a writer who now stays away from conventions, although he stresses that the events in his story are completely fictitious, and any resemblance to people living or dead is either unintentional or for the purposes of satire or parody.

M.S. Swift’s work has been published in a wide range of horror and fantasy anthologies, including the first TQF unsplatterpunk collection. Swift’s writing is inspired by the landscape and mythology of his native Britain. He recently completed a witch hunter novel set in an alternative medieval Britain and is seeking a publisher courageous enough to back it.

Rafe McGregor lectures at Leeds Trinity University and the University of York. He is the author of The Value of Literature, two novels, six collections of short fiction, and two hundred articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent book is The Adventures of Roderick Langham, a collection of occult detective stories.

Stephen Theaker has written several novels, but does not recommend reading them.

Triffooper Saxelbax is an emerging (and often grating) voice in the unsplatterpunk subgenre. When he is not writing, he stir-fries vegetables and decorates pine cones. His work has not been translated into any other languages. Neither has it been nominated for nor appeared in the year’s best so and so. Saxelbax’s mental exertions have caused numerous regional power outages.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Amatka, by Karin Tidbeck (Vintage) | review by Stephen Theaker

Amatka is a settlement which readers might assume is on an alien world, though it could perhaps be somewhere like a warmed-up version of Antarctica. Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two, information specialist with the Essre Hygiene Specialists, and Vanja for short, is sent there to research whether it is a suitable market for the export of cleaning products. She gets on with the work but neglects to utter the name of her suitcase, with the result that it dissolves, and from then she becomes more interested in a budding relationship with her host, Nina, and with what is going on in the world. Why does everything need to be named? What happened to the fifth colony? Questions like these are forbidden, but a friendship with a librarian (as is so often the case in our world too) proves a useful source of information.

One of the first Philip K. Dick novels I read was Time Out of Joint, where a chap in a picture perfect American town starts to notice that things are wrong, that things aren’t really there, just pieces of paper bearing the names of things. This excellent novel, originally published in Sweden in 2012, and translated by the author for this edition, is about a world where people must name things in order for them to exist. That makes for a riveting plot, a Kafkaesque mood, and a real mystery, and it also reflects how language works in our world too, how it divides reality up into manageable portions. For example think how the colour orange didn’t exist as a separate entity until the fruit gave it that name.

It’s also a book about romance, oppression, intellectual curiosity, the effect of separating children from their parents (all children here are brought up in dormitories), and it fits all that into an efficient two hundred pages. The best praise I can give the book is that it lives up to the author’s excellent short story collection, Jagannath. ****

Final Girls, by Mira Grant (Subterranean Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

Virtual reality horror scenarios are being used to heal family wounds. Sisters like Kim and Diane go in hating each other, and their relationships are reforged in the fire of being hunted by by a serial killer. A journalist, Esther Hoffman, comes to investigate the process, concerned by the power of such false memories, a deeply personal concern because of what happened to her father when she was young. Unfortunately her visit coincides with that of an industrial spy and so her trip into virtual reality becomes even more horrific than expected. It’s a good novella that explores the interplay between memories and emotions and relationships and asks whether, if we could tweak those things to make them better, we should. The horror scenes are frightening enough to convince the reader that going through them would have the claimed effect. ****

Acadie, by Dave Hutchinson (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

It’s the day after the president’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday, and a crisis presents itself. An object has passed the dewline, the solar system’s defensive border, which comprises a billion satellites. The object is a highly radioactive fifteen metre long cylinder, with a shield of ice and a fission engine, and it looks like it’s from the Bureau of Colonisation. The Colony was established in secret hundreds of years ago, founded by genetic engineers fleeing from a right-wing theocracy, and the Bureau of Colonisation has been hunting it ever since. As the cover puts it: “The first humans still hunt their children across the stars.” Now they’ve been found. Duke Faraday got the job of president because no one thought he wanted to do it, making him the ideal candidate, but will he be up to the challenge of protecting this hippie paradise, where people happily turn themselves into orcs, elves, vampires and lions? Though it is a very good novella – large-scale science fiction, full of ideas, crammed into a hundred or so pages, with a brilliant ending, just the way I like it – this is quite a tricky book to review, and people who have read it will know why. You will want to have read it before hearing any spoilers, and this review has been redacted somewhat to reflect that. One thing I can talk about is the book’s title: some reviewers have assumed Acadie is the name of the Colony, but I don’t think that’s mentioned in the text. My guess is that it’s a reference to the doomed seventeenth century French colony. ****

Closet Dreams, by Lisa Tuttle (infinity plus) | review by Stephen Theaker

Part of the infinity plus singles series, which aim to bring back the feel of buying a vinyl 45, and then liking it so much you would buy the album too. Short stories are the singles, collections the albums. In this case the single has already been a hit, having appeared in Postscripts, been shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award, and and won the International Horror Guild Award. It’s the chilling story told by a young woman, who says, “Something terrible happened to me when I was a little girl.” Held captive in a small closet by an abductor, she describes the miraculous escape that baffled her family and the police. It’s not a long story, so it’s hard to say much more without giving too much away, but it certainly achieved the goal of making me want to read more by the same author. ****

The Penny Dreadfuls, Volume 2, by David Reed and Humphey Ker (BBC Audio) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Penny Dreadfuls are a comedy troupe – Humphrey Ker, David Reed and Thom Tuck – three chaps who retell classic tales in comedic fashion. The stories are scripted, rather than improvisational: Reed writes the plays, with additional material from Ker. This volume collects three of their productions, which originally appeared on Radio 4: Macbeth Rebothered (2014), The Odyssey (2015) and The Curse of the Beagle (2016). A typically appreciative Radio 4 audience is audible throughout, and adds to the atmosphere. Volume one was published concurrently, but, since it looked to be more focused on spoofing actual history, I went straight to the more obviously fantastical volume two. Margaret Cabourne-Smith appears in all three stories, performing most of the female roles, and getting many of the best lines. Susan Calman, Robert Webb, Greg McHugh and Lolly Adefope also take part.

Calman narrates the story of the Scottish play. They call it that as if it’s the only one, she observes, and at the end declares: “This has, without any doubt, been a tale, told by some idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but at least it had some jokes in it.” They were good jokes too, but The Odyssey had the most and biggest laughs, for me, because Robert Webb’s foolish and vain Odysseus is such a funny character, who never fails to rush into trouble in search of spoils. Eventually he comes to a realisation: “I had always believed my actions to be good and honourable because I had followed my heart. Not once had I considered that my heart might be a bit of a bell-end.” In The Curse of the Beagle, a young Charles Darwin travels on the ship of that name, but there seems to be something supernatural going on, involving a hairy beast that uses its long gentleman’s part as a belt. If he doesn’t sort it out, he will fail his degree. It was a bit hard to relax into this one: it’s odd to hear comedy cannibals with funny voices in a modern day radio programme, even if it ends up undermining the old stereotypes.

Listeners who haven’t read the original texts won’t be lost, since the stories are kept quite intact and given room to be told properly – each audio play is about an hour long. Even where jokes are based on the quirks of the original texts (e.g. Odysseus having implausibly repetitive adventures), the plays quickly key listeners in so that everyone can get the next joke about the same thing. It should appeal to anyone who has been enjoying Upstart Crow as much as I have (which is quite a lot): the plays have a similar mixture of clever literary jokes and very silly ones, and they are also narratively very satisfying, with proper heartfelt moments. ****

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

People are using wormholes to travel to distant planets, and since that can be a dangerous business their insurers tend to insist that the expeditions include a so-called murderbot (a SecUnit) to do any necessary killing. They also record every conversation for later data-mining. One of these robots is our protagonist, and since it has hacked the governor module that would normally keep it under control the explorers don’t realise how much danger they are in. Luckily for them, the murderbot prefers soap opera to grand guignol. Less luckily, someone or something else has tampered with their equipment and data. When a competing base on the other side of the world goes dark, the murderbot accompanies the scientists on a trip to investigate, while trying to deal with the social anxiety that inevitably results from spending time with people who at any moment could rumble its secrets and have it disassembled. They freak out enough even when seeing it has a humanoid face under its helmet. This is a short, very enjoyable book about an anti-hero who can take a lot of damage and keep on going, who almost despite itself starts putting others ahead of its own interests; a bit like Wolverine or Snake Plissken but with the insecurity that comes from its particular circumstances. Placing a character like that in a terribly dangerous scenario with ruthless villains on the loose and a bunch of decent scientists to protect makes for good reading. The fight scenes are very well worked, and so is the evolution of the robot’s relationships with its colleagues/leaseholders. I doubt this’ll be the last book I read about this robot. ****

Iron Fist, Season 1, by Scott Buck and chums (Marvel/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Joy (Jessica Stroup) and Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) are the siblings who run the immense multinational Rand Corporation, which was founded by Wendell Rand (who died with his family in a plane crash) and their unpleasant father (David Wenham), who died of cancer. A problem presents itself: a homeless man (Finn Jones) turns up at their building, claiming to be Danny Rand, son of their father’s partner, and an old friend of theirs. If it is Danny Rand, he would own 51% of their company. At first they don’t believe him, to the extent that they throw him out without asking a handful of obvious questions that could have easily confirmed his identity.

However, it soon becomes clear that he is really Danny Rand, and here they have a stroke of good fortune: he’s a complete idiot who believes everything he is told, happily tells psychiatric doctors about his time in the mythical kingdom of K’un Lun, and is incapable of putting together the simplest clues as to what is really going on. Less fortunately for them, he begins to acquire capable and sensible allies: Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), a karate instructor who will help him fight, Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson, reprising her role from all the previous Netflix/Marvel shows), a nurse who will help him heal, and Jeri Hogarth (from Jessica Jones; Carrie-Anne Moss), a lawyer who will help him get his company back.

Very occasionally he uses the martial arts skills that he acquired during his absence (though he’s very bad at knocking people out), and even more rarely he uses his special power, a glowing fist that can punch through anything. Joy and Ward don’t seem that bright either, since Danny Rand doesn’t really care about money, owning a company, or running a company; he only gets mired in that stuff in order to establish his identity and reclaim his name.

And so we get a show that spends masses of its time worrying about which of the repellant Meachums or their rivals (including the manipulative Madame Gao, played by Wai Ching Ho) is truly in charge of their company, while the titular character scowls his way through every scene and scampers around like a silly puppy at their beck and call. Viewers know that he has had a difficult time of it – the plane crash and subsequent years of apparently abusive training have left him suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – and he has not lived in the modern world, but it’s still hard to forgive his lack of regard for women’s boundaries in the early episodes (he breaks into the homes of both Joy and Colleen) and the way that he constantly acts like a colossal jerk. It’s hard to understand why Colleen Wing comes to like him so much, but thank goodness she does, because the programme would be much less watchable without her likeable and energetic presence. It picks up later as mysterious men Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) and Davos (Sacha Dawan) come to the fore, and with the latter there are even a few moments of much-needed comedy, but this still goes down as the least of the Netflix Marvel shows so far.

It was criticised before release by people who wished Danny had been played by an Asian actor. You can understand why they felt that way, but it would have been a completely different show: this is all about a rich white guy who is the first outsider to acquire the Iron Fist power, to the great resentment of those locals who thought it was their birthright. What harms the programme more is the actor’s apparent lack of martial arts skills. Season two could be better. It needs Danny to be a bit less one note in his reactions, it needs an antagonist who is in direct conflict with Danny rather than ambivalent towards him, and most importantly it needs much better fight scenes. The pace is no faster than season one of Daredevil, but in Daredevil the fights are worth the wait. In a show specifically about a martial arts master, the fight scenes need to be outstanding. ***

Into the Unknown: a Journey Through Science Fiction, curated by Patrick Gyger (Barbican) | review by Stephen Theaker

This exhibition, billed as “the genre-defining exhibition of art, design, film & literature”, began running at the Barbican on 3 June 2017 (the day the TQF co-editors and their families attended), and would remain open until 1 September 2017. It was announced in 2016, and I had been looking forward to it ever since, but in the event it was, despite some remarkable exhibits, a bit of a disappointment. Part of that can perhaps be laid at the tickets, which promised three parts, but only the first was the exhibition proper, and there wasn’t very much of it.

The items in the main section included books (not all classics, or valuable editions – it was peculiar to see books I own under glass), magazines, short films (including one written by an AI, the actors gamely trying to find the truth in its words), spectacular model space guns, spaceships, space stations and spacesuits – including John Hurt’s from Alien, which was amazing to see, though one might doubt its provenance seeing as no hole had been burnt in the faceplate!

The problem is that these were cramped into a very small space, so much so that we were told to carry our backpacks rather than wear them. It would have definitely have had more impact had the items been spaced out more – for example, few in our party even noticed the robot from Interstellar, which would have made a formidable exhibit on a plinth of its own, lurking in the shade of Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the showier robots from Lost in Space and I, Robot. Godzilla heads are only visible from a distance, and like many items can only be seen from one side.

The second part was a film, into which only a dozen or so people could enter at a time, leading to queues – odd for a booked event at which the numbers present during any given time slot should have been fairly predictable. The third part was a spinning robot shining a light that seems intended to create patterns, giving a sense of artificial intelligence. I spent most of that exhibit worrying about whether the children would tear the paper sheets that surrounded the robot. There was also a selection of sf video games like Half-Life 2, and music from people like Tangerine Dream, accessible to the public as well as those attending the exhibition.

“Genre-defining” is a big thing to ask of an exhibition. It was however a pleasant look through the nice collection of a wealthy chap, but one suspects that many visitors will have had quite interesting collections of their own, albeit gathered at rather less cost. It was definitely worth a look for those already in London, but we didn’t feel it had been worth the special trip we made to see it. Those who were unable to visit should note that the catalogue is an impressive hardback book, available from the Barbican’s online shop. ***

John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection, by John Wyndham et al. (BBC Worldwide) | review by Stephen Theaker

This marvellous audiobook collects five full-cast BBC adaptations of John Wyndham’s classic science fiction work – five novels, plus a short story – as well as Beware the Stare, a half-hour documentary from 1998. It’s a ten-hour journey into some catastrophes that are not at all as cosy as I remembered.

Giles Cooper’s chilling six-part adaptation of The Day of the Triffids dates from 1968, and is framed as a record of the events being made years after. Bill Masen found a triffid growing in his garden as a youngster, studied it, and got a job farming them. A triffid sting leaves him in hospital with bandaged eyes during a meteor shower that blinds everyone else. This leads of course to the scenes that inspired the beginnings of 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, as he emerges blinking into a world gone mad. In this adaptation this sequence is particularly distressing, since we hear the wails of babies as he ruthlessly walks away from their ward. Outside the hospital he finds that people are killing their own children and committing suicide.

It seems odd that mere hours after discovering their blindness people would go to such extremes – wouldn’t you wait a little while to see if the effect wore off? And it’s very hard to like a hero who walks away from crying babies and starts breaking into people’s homes on day one. He meets up with a woman, and they make no effort at all to help other people: their plan – on the first day of the disaster! – is to leave London until everyone has died and all the bodies have finished rotting away. But they become more sympathetic as the story goes on, as the triffids escape from the farms, and as they meet other survivors who are even worse. It’s a very well done adaptation, its only flaw (one it shares with The Chrysalids) being some ear-curdling adult-for-child acting when a young girl joins their group.

At the end of the adaptation what seem to be a set of deleted scenes play out, which are interesting to hear, but it’s easy to miss the start of the next story, The Kraken Wakes. How there has never been a film of this classic novel, when we’re about to get a fifth version of The Body Snatchers, I don’t know. This ninety-minute adaptation is from 1998, and it charts the course of another slow invasion: lights are seen falling into the sea, ships start to go missing, and then, after attempts to blow up whatever’s in the water, coastal towns mysteriously lose their populations. The scenes in which our protagonists witness an attack on a seaside town is terrifying to listen to, the screams of those caught in the attackers’ clutches horribly realistic. Until the truth of it all becomes too obvious to deny, people ignore what’s happening, laugh at the very idea of it. It’s ironic that John Wyndham’s idea of a devastating alien attack proves to be something we’re actually doing to ourselves.

The Chrysalids is rather different to the other novels, in that it begins in the future, after what seems to be a nuclear disaster. Mutation is feared, and those born differently face execution or exile. Not all mutations are visible, though, and a group of children who can thought-speak to each other at a distance struggle to keep their secret, especially when a much more powerful telepath makes herself known. This 1981 adaptation would be fine were it not for the aforementioned adult-for-child acting.

Survival is from 1989, and seems to be from an anthology series. A spaceship full of would-be colonists goes off course, and we see how far they will go in order to stay alive. The ending is gloriously nasty. Doctor Who fans will be pleased to hear Brigadier Nicholas Courtney pop up briefly.

The two-part adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos is from 2003, and is another highlight. It flips the premise of The Chrysalids: the psychic children of that story were the heroes, but here they are the villains, though that seems just to be a matter of perspective. Everyone in the village of Midwich falls asleep, and after a little while the women all realise that they are pregnant. The children, when born, are very strange, and take control of their parents. Whereas the film stuck with the children and their teacher, this version follows the brilliant Bill Nighy and his wife when they leave Midwich, and then return a few years later to see how strange things have got. Like The Kraken Wakes, this is a slow-moving disaster story, and it is all the worse for how natural it all feels.

Chocky is from 1998, and is the story of Matthew Gore, a boy whose imaginary friend is teaching him binary calculations and asking questions about space travel. Unlike some of the other stories, this features a child in the role of the child, and benefits accordingly. It’s Sacha Dhawan, from Iron Fist and An Adventure in Space and Time, who would have been about fifteen at the time.

The audiobook ends with the short documentary, produced to tie in with The Midwich Cuckoos. It’s interesting – and includes clips of other adaptations – though it raises as many questions as it answers: why did John Wyndham burn his diaries? And did the US science fiction magazines of the 1950s really demand the inclusion of explicit sex scenes?

This is an exceptionally good collection, showcasing both the work of a brilliant writer and the talent involved in BBC radio drama. Some of these have been available individually, so being able to get the entire collection for a single Audible token is great value for money. Highly recommended. *****

Eastercon 2017: Innominate | review by Stephen Theaker

I only attended for two days of this four-day convention, Saturday and Monday. It took place in Birmingham in April 2017, at a hotel close to the NEC, near enough for me to travel to in an hour or so on public transport, so I had bought a full membership fairly early on without knowing whether I would be free or not. My daughter and I attended on Saturday. I bought her a one-day ticket at a very reasonable rate. She was interested in attending a talk on manga and anime, and a session on painting alien worlds, and enjoyed them both. We also watched the BSFA awards, which were good, convivial fun, and then the first episode of Doctor Who season ten, which was shown on three huge screens in the main events room.

My daughter enjoyed herself enough to recommend the event to my younger daughter, my wife, and the two children of my co-editor, so they all came with us on the Monday. Upon arriving we had the nice surprise of discovering that my older daughter’s painting from the Saturday session had won a prize in the children’s art show, which got the day off to a great start. It was a banner day too for my younger daughter, who for the very first time in her life, after being asked for her name, had someone recognise it and say, “Oh, like Telzey Amberdon.”

That day we attended hair-braiding and journal decoration sessions, which were interesting, even for those of us without hair or journals (the hair I lost long ago; the journal I gave away to a little girl who didn’t have her own). Between the two workshops we attended the closing ceremony, which must have been an odd experience for the four members of our group who had only arrived an hour and a half before.

Not staying at the hotel overnight, only attending a couple of panels, not being there for the full four days, and not really talking to anyone in the bar, I suppose most people would say I didn’t properly get stuck into the convention, but I’d still say it was my favourite convention experience yet. A few years ago I said to an occasional TQF contributor that I didn’t really like conventions. He told me that perhaps I had been going to the wrong ones, and after this weekend I think he may have been right.

On the surface this convention was almost completely indistinguishable from the last one I attended in York (my favourite convention before this one), but a few small and significant differences emerged over the couple of days. The strand of events for children was one. (If we’d realised there was a Lego Minifigure event on Sunday we’d have gone on that day too.) It also seemed to have more fans as opposed to career-orientated writers (something at least one writer has grumbled about). And we didn’t hear anyone bellowing across the convention rooms like territorial wildebeests.

Course, my experience of other cons is probably coloured to some extent that I went there to present various reports to the AGMs, and watch the awards I’d administered play out, appear on panels a couple of times, and one time be the secretary and treasurer for the whole bleeding thing, whereas Eastercon was pure relaxation, nothing to do except listen to clever people talk about things (Aliette de Bodard was a standout contributor to both panels I attended) or watch the children get on with fun and creative activities.

Best of all, there were plenty of places to sit when nothing was happening. Sofas everywhere, a quiet room, a fan lounge; it really contrasted well with all the times I’ve been at conventions and struggled to find somewhere to sit and read my new books. There was no goody bag, and no convention souvenir book, two things some attendees of other cons care very deeply about, but I wasn’t at all bothered by their absence. The daily newsletters about convention occurrences were great fun.

If Eastercon returns to Birmingham we’ll definitely go again, and I think we enjoyed it enough that we could even be tempted a bit further afield. ****

Willful Child by Steven Erikson | review by Stephen Theaker

“Dad! First contact! Vulcans!” “Wish it was, boy,” Harry replied. “More like… idiots.” Three-eyed aliens visiting Earth in the “Age of Masturbation” leave behind a spaceship and get us started on a programme of galactic expansion. A century or so later Captain Hadrian Alan Sawback finagles his way into command of the starship Willful Child. He’s a terrible sexist, obsessed with trying to have sex with the female crew members and making sure male crew members know their place: not on away missions and well out of the limelight.

Halley Sin-Dour is his Spock, Saavik and Number One. She makes announcements in “in a deep, full-throated voice that rolled out, came back, and landed in Hadrian’s groin”. Combat specialist Lieutenant Galk comes from a world where the dictionary entry for mundanity runs to thirty pages, and Doctor Printlip deflates whenever he speaks for too long. Pilot Jocelyn Sticks was personally selected by the captain on the basis of her file photo, and he looks forward to the way that “from his position in the command chair, she would have to twist her upper body round to address him”. Hm.

The captain remembers television. He wears a polyester uniform, records a personal log, and insists on a view of the stars when they are in transit. The ship’s ongoing mission, according to him, is to “to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms”. Their first assigned mission is to investigate the smuggling of knockoff Terran sports apparel in the Blarad System, but the ship gets infected with a mysterious AI, Tammy, who takes them off to the Exclusion Zone, deep inside Radulak-Klang territory. This leads to an appropriately episodic series of adventures that provide plenty of novelty and surprise.

Science fiction satire may be a departure for Steven Erikson from the fantasy of the Malazan Book of the Fallen and the brilliant Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas, but this isn’t a feeble Game of Groans parody of a genre’s surface quirks; it retains the abrasive intelligence that characterised those novellas, and applies it to a deep understanding of the foibles and structures of Star Trek. Steven Erikson credits his wife for telling him “screw everything – just write the damned thing!” It feels like a passion project rather than an opportunistic cash-in on the success of John Scalzi’s Redshirts.

“See what comes with standardizing every approach on the ecliptic?” observes the captain after a near miss with a heavy freighter. “Ridiculous, you’d think we were boats or something.” (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan famously took its cues on everything from uniforms to space battles from the Horatio Hornblower series.) The book references everything from Wesley Crusher to the way Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test, while constantly interrogating the premise of the show. Would the human race be wise to hang its hopes on a Captain Kirk? Would a galaxy dominated by humans (“a voracious, appallingly shortsighted sentient species”) be such a good idea?

The problem is that the book’s affectionate spoofing of sex-obsessed Kirk means it features a good deal of sexism itself, and though it’s coming from a particular character’s mouth and point of view some readers may find it a bit too much. To add another example to those above, at one point the captain watches a “marine cross the bridge, gaze fixing on the meaty sway of her behind”. As a thirteen-year-old I might well have thought “meaty sway of her behind” the most evocative phrase I had ever read, and I’d probably have thought this the best book ever written. Being an adult, I enjoyed it despite the lechery, rather than because of it.

The captain does turn out to have rather more to him than at first appears, which makes for an interesting plot, and along with the number of times he comes a cropper it’s hard to think the book endorses his behaviour. It reminded me of the animated television series Archer. Archer, a secret agent, is another gifted, overconfident and oversexed buffoon, but he is partnered with Lana, who constantly calls him on his sexism, and reminds viewers to laugh at him, not with him. A Lana might have done Captain Sawback some good.

“Hostile planets, hostile aliens. Hostile aliens on hostile planets,” says the captain, “and out there, in that unending cavalcade of danger, I intend to enjoy myself.” Many readers will enjoy themselves too, but read a preview before buying, just in case. I’d like to read a sequel or two – it has the vigour, sauce and sense of adventure that latter-day Star Trek sorely lacked – but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who loathed every word. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #256.

Theaker's Quarterly Awards 2018: the winners!

As announced in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #62, these are the winners of the Theaker's Quarterly Awards 2018. Voting was open to the public from February 11 to 25, and people could vote for as many items as they wanted in each category. Items were eligible if they had appeared in or were reviewed in the previous four issues of the magazine. Here are the results!

Audio

• 1st John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection, by John Wyndham et al. (BBC Worldwide)
• 2nd Children of Eden, by Joey Graceffa and Laura L. Sullivan (Simon and Schuster Audio)
• 3rd The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi (Audible)

Books

• 1st Pirate Utopia, by Bruce Sterling (Tachyon Publications)
• 2nd I Am Providence, by Nick Mamatas (Night Shade Books)
• 3rd Metronome, by Oliver Langmead (Unsung Stories)

Comics

• 1st Adventure Time: Marceline Gone Adrift, by Meredith Gran and Carey Pietsch (Boom! Studios)
• 2nd X-Men: Legacy by Simon Spurrier, Tan Eng Huat and chums (Marvel)
• 3rd The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga, by Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, Larry Mahlstedt and chums (DC)

Events

• 1st Eastercon 2017: Innominate
• 2nd Into the Unknown: a Journey Through Science Fiction, curated by Patrick Gyger (Barbican)

Films

• 1st Star Wars: The Last Jedi, by Rian Johnson (Lucasfilm et al.)
• 2nd Blade Runner 2049, by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green (16:14 Entertainment et al.)
• 3rd Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (Disney)

Music

• 1st Humanz (Deluxe), by Gorillaz (Parlophone)

Television

• 1st Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One)
• 2nd Westworld, Season 1, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and chums (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• 3rd Legion, Season 1, by Noah Hawley and chums (FX)

Issue of TQF

• 1st Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #59, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood
• 2nd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: Unsplatterpunk, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek
• 3rd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #60, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood

TQF cover art

• 1st Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #60, art by Howard Watts
• 2nd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #59, art by Howard Watts
• 3rd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #61, art by Howard Watts

Fiction from TQF

• 1st Bound for Glory, by Allen Ashley (TQF61)
• 2nd Man + Van, by David Penn (TQF59)
• 3rd The Lost Testament, by Rafe McGregor (TQF60)

Congratulations to all the winners! To claim their prestigious Theaker’s Quarterly Awards trophy, winners should email a postal address to us at theakersquarterlyfiction@gmail.com.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #62: out now!

free epub | free mobi | Free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

We really needed to start work on our Unsplatterpunk special, so at first we released Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #62 just in pdf form. More formats are now available!

Issue sixty-two contains three stories: “The Nine Dread Ladies of the Tyranium” by Antonella Coriander, “Dundoronum” by Stephen Theaker and “Listen to the Loudest Whisper” by Walt Brunston, plus twenty-one reviews, all by Stephen Theaker.

It also features some “fascinating” statistics about Stephen's lifetime of reading, and the announcement of the winners of the Theaker's Quarterly Awards 2018!

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Here are the superb and mostly pseudonymous contributors to this issue:

Antonella Coriander knows when you’ve been naughty, and she’s going to use that information against you. To this issue she supplies the latest adventure of Beatrice and Veronique: “The Nine Dread Ladies of the Tyranium”.

Howard Watts provides the exceptional wraparound cover for this issue. He is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford. His artwork can be seen in its native resolution on his DeviantArt page: http://hswatts.deviantart.com. His novel The Master of Clouds is available on Kindle.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. His reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal. To this issue he supplies “Dundoronum”, an adventure of Rolnikov and Pelney.

Walt Brunston’s adaptation of the classic television story, Space University Trent: Hyperparasite, is now available on Kindle. To this issue he supplies “Listen to the Loudest Whisper”, a new instalment in the adventures of the Two Husbands.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Black and Brown Planets, ed. by Isiah Lavender III | review by Stephen Theaker

Subtitled The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, this book (University Press of Mississippi, hb) aims to show “what SF criticism means when joined with critical race theories and histories of oppression”. Part one, Black Planets, features essays about African-Americans and sf. Lisa Yaszek introduces the idea of “The Bannekerade: Genius, Madness, and Magic in Black Science Fiction”, explaining how Benjamin Banneker’s life has inspired stories of “black technoscientific genius”. The essay identifies several interesting works, but it’s not clear that there are many distinct examples of the Bannekerade.

In “‘The Best Is Yet to Come’; or, Saving the Future: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Astrofuturism”, De Witt Douglas Kilgore writes about the episodes that threw Commander Sisko into the life of a black writer in the fifties, and wonders whether Star Trek’s racism-free future is as positive as it seems. In “Far Beyond the Star Pit: Samuel R. Delany”, Gerry Canavan reads that story “as an allegory for life under the regime of legal and customary segregation known as white supremacy”.

As well as the introduction, Lavender writes “Digging Deep: Ailments of Difference in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’”, where he suggests that Butler’s story can be read as an allegory for race in America. In “The Laugh of Anansi: Why Science Fiction Is Pertinent to Black Children’s Literature Pedagogy” Marleen Barr argues that children’s sf featuring black heroes “causes a wrinkle in time, a respite from the history of oppression”.

Part two, Brown Planets, ranges further afield, though surprisingly not to India (“Africa and Asia are beyond the scope of this collection”).

In “Haint Stories Rooted in Conjure Science: Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire” Grace Dillon explains how that novel incorporates “indigenous scientific literacies, a forward-thinking way of characterizing indigenous knowledge in opposition to Euro-Western characterizations of ‘native superstition’ and magic”. In “Questing for an Indigenous Future: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as Indigenous Science Fiction” Patrick Sharp makes similar points, while comparing post-apocalyptic narratives with a novel about a town affected by uranium mining.

The view of science put forward in those essays seems almost Victorian, all taxonomies and determinism. In “Monteiro Lobato’s O presidente negro (The Black President): Eugenics and the Corporate State in Brazil”, M. Elizabeth Ginway explains how science earned that bad reputation, using a 1926 “chilling fictional experiment in genocide” to illuminate the thinking behind the Brazilian eugenics movement. A highlight is Lobato’s honest surprise that no US publisher wanted his racist book.

In “Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech” Lysa Rivera reads Hogan’s novel as a science fictionalization of José Vasconcelos’s theory that the melting pot of Mexico might eventually produce a cosmic “fifth race”, which will lead us into enlightenment. Matthew Goodwin’s “Virtual Reality at the Border of Migration, Race, and Labor” critiques the notion of cyberspace as post-racial utopia, considering, for example, how it provides cheap labour without allowing immigration. In “A Dis-(Orient)ation: Race, Technoscience, and The Windup Girl” Malisa Kurtz applies the concept of “raced” characters, who may not face problems relating to their ethnicity, but are marked in other ways, such as Emiko’s built-in physical stutters.

Though it’s a reprint, “Yellow, Black, Metal, and Tentacled: The Race Question in American Science Fiction” is worth reading first, as Edward James provides a useful overview of how American sf has tackled race (or not). It gives context to the more tightly focused essays, though his concerns about “the problem of the recognition of race in SF” – the risk of assuming sf is about race and not, say, technology – aren’t shared by many contributors.

In “The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In” Robin Reid notes the variety of fans who asserted their presence after Racefail, and catalogues how they described their ethnicity and nationality. It addresses the book’s title: “white readers of SF … simply did not see all the planets (black and brown and many other colors) that exist and have existed, independent of white observers”. Like “new” planets now being discovered, minority readers and writers of sf were always out there.

Like any book of literary criticism, it can be dull, but that’s outweighed by the issues, authors and stories it works so carefully to bring to our attention. A few essays make great claims without much evidence, but all provide much to think about; it opens up the conversation, rather than having the last word. Walter Mosley is quoted inside as saying: “The power of science fiction is that it can tear down the walls and windows, the artifice and laws by changing the logic, empowering the disenfranchised or simply by asking, What if?” Black and Brown Planets shows how writers and critics are doing just that. ****

A slightly shorter version of this review appeared in Interzone #255.

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley | review by Stephen Theaker

The Beauty (Unsung Stories) is a story told by Nathan. Telling stories has been his job ever since the women and girls first began to fall sick and he stood up at the commune’s campfire and retold the story of a famous boy wizard to keep away the silence of the night. It has now been six years since the last women in the valley died, all of them victims of an aggressive fungal infection. The future is bleak, but he tells the surviving men and teenage boys tales of the past, doing his best to keep the women alive, in their thoughts at least. For sex and love the younger men make do with each other. That brings comfort, but there’s no future in it for the species, and no hope, even for a community that was self-sufficient before the disaster.

That is, until Nathan’s encounter in the woods with what he calls the Beauty, a being very like a woman in some ways, disturbingly different in others: “It has breasts, globes of yellow, and rounded hips that speak to me of woman, of want, and that disgusts me beyond words.” His return to the commune with his Beauty, and a crowd of others like it, changes everything, and those changes are not welcomed by all. But he finds an unexpected ally in his Uncle Ted, who till now had lived out in the woods, up to who knows what, and the teenagers are very enthusiastic about the new situation: they “wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties – no more zips to undo, simply lift the material!”

This is a short book with a lot to say, all of it interesting. About what people are prepared to do in order to survive, and how far others will go to prevent change; or, if we step back from Nathan’s point of view, a book about collaborators, and how collaboration can corrupt and degrade. On another level it’s about how men are affected by the absence of women, and later how they might react to losing their ill-earned place as the dominant gender: some with relief, others with murderous rage. Or it could be taken as an interrogation of that male fantasy, the all-sex all-the-time relationship, the always-available partner; it suggests how quickly life with a sexbot (or here, a sex mushroom) might lose its shine. Though it’s not quite a horror novella, its awful transformations of the flesh would do David Cronenberg proud.

Most of all it’s about the power of storytelling to preserve our past and shape our future, and so one can see why it would appeal to an imprint called Unsung Stories; on this evidence a name to look out for. The Beauty is intellectual and visceral, frightening and thoughtful, an adventure and a meditation. Letting my copy of Whiteley’s Mean Mode Median go unread for so long has clearly been a huge mistake. ****

This review originally appeared in Interzone #254.

Smiler’s Fair by Rebecca Levene | review by Stephen Theaker

“They say the fair holds one example of all that there is in the world – every food, every spice, every pleasure and every vice,” says nobleman Lahiru, who, though married with three children, will be “hunting the finest boy flesh to be had for many miles” during his visit. Smiler’s Fair is a travelling city, drawn by mammoths from place to place, because no one stays still for too long in this world. Do so and the worm men will get you! The fair, home to scoundrels, scum and psychopaths, takes a daily census of its inhabitants and visitors, and when the first death comes the fair moves on. For our cast of characters, all roads pass through this exciting, squalid, movable feast.

The eyes of Krish have silver irises, and so King Nayan, his birth father, wanted him dead to undo a prophecy. Cut from his mother’s belly and stolen away, Krish knows nothing of that, and lives as a shepherd until a brush with the king’s flying squad sets him on the run. Lady Nethmi has been sent by her uncle to marry old Lord Thilak, but he already has a good woman to share his bed.

Eric is a teenage sellcock, growing too old for the sleazy customers of his owner, Madam Aeronwen. He decides to follow his favourite client home from the fair. Dae Hyo, perhaps the last of his tribe, would avenge the murder of his people and reclaim his homeland; trouble is, he’s also a recovering alcoholic chased out of town after he fell asleep on the job and got a team of miners killed by the worm men.

Smiler’s Fair is very much the first part of a series, and doesn’t work brilliantly as a standalone novel. The protagonists move around the board, but few of their stories progress very far. It feels like threads were added till there were enough to fill the pages, rather than because they were truly needed. There’s a common theme to some of them, of scorned and mistreated wives: the woman who adopted Krish, beaten by the husband she always wanted to leave; Nethmi, an unwilling wife with an uncaring husband; Babi, wife of gay lord Lahiru, humiliated by the lover brought into their home. But with no common catalyst, it feels oddly coincidental that these life-changing adventures all begin at once.

The prose style feels uncomplicated and perhaps even deliberately simplified: in one five-page section I looked at, ninety-five per cent of the text was made up of one and two-syllable words, with only two of eighteen hundred words reaching five syllables. It feels like the language is pitched at someone with the reading age of eleven or twelve, though the content is far too salty for that age group. This makes it an easy and accessible book to read, but once you notice it’s hard not to feel like the book is talking down to you.

Levene’s editorial work on the excellent Doctor Who line from Virgin Books was very well regarded, and this feels rather like a book written by a canny editor who has surveyed the market, thought about what will be marketable (it will appeal to fans of Game of Thrones), and produced a book designed to fit the bill. Some parts are a bit corny – one man becomes the captive of a society of women, who of course require impregnation! – but it’s a solid adventure and I enjoyed reading it. I’m sure it will find fans, though I probably won’t read any sequels: I’m not worried about the characters, nor really intrigued by the trundly setting.

The worm men are frightening at first, but the premise of the book, that they can’t dig up into your home if it’s on the move (because the sun poisons the land against them), was unconvincing, and felt like an arbitrary way to set this world in motion. For me that world is in some ways too similar to our own: there are mammoths, but also snakes, cows, horses, goats, rats, etc. Maybe it is our world, or maybe it’s just parallel evolution, but the inclusion of Earth Prime animals in a fantasy novel always feels to me like a wasted opportunity. It’s ironic that fantasy is often less adventurous than science fiction when it comes to these things.

Promisingly, events later in the book suggest that the Hollow Gods of the series title might play a bigger role in future volumes. More weirdness and magic would certainly have made this book more appealing, and it might prove easier to take an interest in the lives of these mostly unpleasant characters if they were set in opposition to gods who are even worse. ***

This review originally appeared in Interzone #254.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #61: now out!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Issue sixty-one of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction is out now! It contains two stories from old friends – Allen Ashley (“Bound for Glory”) and Douglas Thompson (“Yttrium: Part 2”) – plus four stories from first-time contributors – S.J. Hosking (“The Guidance Counsellor”), A. Katherine Black (“Tether”), Tim Major (“To Ashes, Dust”) and Libby Heily (“Regression”) – plus “Frakking Toasters”, a non-fiction article on the language of Battlestar Galactica from Jessy Randall.

Then there are nine reviews from the usual team of Douglas J. Ogurek, Rafe McGregor, Jacob Edwards and Stephen Theaker: the BBC Radio John Wyndham Collection, Pawn by Timothy Zahn, Annabelle: Creation, Blade Runner 2049, Geostorm, It, Justice League, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Thor: Ragnarok. The wraparound cover artwork is by the marvellous Howard Watts, completing a run of thirty-one consecutive covers!

Sorry it’s so much later than planned. But we always get there in the end! We're ten issues ahead of my heroes at McSweeney's now, you know, and we gave them a ten-issue head start…

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Here are the splendid and soulful contributors to this issue:

A. Katherine Black is an audiologist on some days and a writer on others. Her fiction has appeared in Farther Stars Than These, Seven by Twenty, Abstract Jam and others, and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine. She lives in Maryland with her family, their cats and her coffee machine. Website: www.flywithpigs.com.

Allen Ashley works as a creative writing tutor with six groups running across north London, including the advanced science fiction and fantasy group Clockhouse London Writers. He is the judge for the annual British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition and is currently working on an editing project on behalf of the BFS.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales, Gone Lawn, and several anthologies. Douglas’s website can be found at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/unsplatter
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Douglas Thompson won the Herald/Grolsch Question of Style Award in 1989, second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007, and the Faith/Unbelief Poetry Prize in 2016. His short stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Ambit, New Writing Scotland and Albedo One. His first book, Ultrameta, published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, was followed by eight subsequent novels and short story collections: Sylvow (Eibonvale Press, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn Publishing, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen Press, 2012), The Rhymer (Elsewhen Press, 2014), The Brahan Seer (Acair Books, 2014), Volwys (Dog Horn Publishing, 2014), and The Sleep Corporation (The Exaggerated Press, 2015). A new combined collection of short stories and poems The Fallen West will be published by Snuggly Books in early 2018. His first poetry collection Eternity’s Windfall will be published by Red Squirrel in early 2018. A retrospective collection of his earlier poetry, Soured Utopias, will be published by Dog Horn in late 2018. “Yttrium: Part 2” is taken from his novel Barking Circus, forthcoming in 2018 from Eibonvale. “Yttrium: Part 1” appeared in TQF60.

Jacob Edwards also writes 42-word reviews for Derelict Space Sheep. His website is at www.jacobedwards.id.au, his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JacobEdwardsWriter, and his Twitter account is at www.twitter.com/ToastyVogon.

Jessy Randall’s stories, poems, and other things have appeared in Asimov’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, McSweeney’s and Theaker’s (most recently in April 2017). She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is bit.ly/JessyRandall. “Frakking Toasters” was originally written for the wonderful and now-defunct Verbatim: The Language Quarterly.

Libby Heily’s short stories have been published in The Write Room, Mixer Publishing, Bookends Review, The Dirty Pool, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal and Twisted Sister Literary Magazine. Her plays have received multiple staged readings around the country and have been produced at Longwood University, Davis and Elkins College, Sonorous Road Theater and by the Cary Playwrights Forum. Her Young Adult novel, Welcome to Sortilege Falls, was published in 2016 by Fire and Ice YA Publishing. The sequel, Wrong Side of the Rift, was published in November 2017.

Rafe McGregor is the author of The Value of Literature, The Architect of Murder, five collections of short fiction, and over one hundred articles and essays. He lectures at the University of York and can be found online at www.twitter.com/rafemcgregor.

S.J. Hosking enjoys a wide variety of literary genres, and historical fiction, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and gothic are amongst his favourites. His literary influences include, but are not limited to, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Robert Harris, C.J. Sansom, and Stephen King. S.J. has had one story published so far, “The Princess and the Tower”, in Aphotic Realm magazine (Apparitions, June/July 2017). Aside from short stories, S.J. also writes poetry and flash fiction, and has had a sestina published online. He is currently working on his first novel. When not writing, S.J. enjoys running, walking, swimming and tennis.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. His reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal.

Tim Major is a freelance editor and co-editor of the British Fantasy Society’s fiction journal, BFS Horizons. His first novel, You Don’t Belong Here, was published by Snowbooks. He has also released two novellas: Blighters (Abaddon) and Carus & Mitch (Omnium Gatherum). In 2018 ChiZine will publish his first YA novel, Luna Press will publish his first short story collection and Electric Dreamhouse Press will publish his non-fiction book about the silent crime film, Les Vampires. Tim’s short stories have appeared in Interzone, Not One of Us and numerous anthologies. Find out more at www.cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.