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
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
I fell in love with this game when browsing a replay movie. As Master Chief, the last hope for humanity, I had fought my way down a bog-standard corridor on my way to more exciting stuff. Watching the replay, I paused the game and zipped the camera down to the other end of the corridor to watch my death-dealing approach from the point of view of my enemies. That was cool enough in itself, but then I noticed one of the pint-sized grunts running off down a corridor. What was he doing? I took the camera down that same corridor, and watched him hide in the darkness as I ran past. Once I was gone, the grunt said with relief (words to the effect of), “I’m glad he’s gone!” Genius! I’ve rarely seen such attention to detail in a game – or perhaps it’s better to say that the attention to detail has never been highlighted in such an effective way. Like the achievements you can gain in this and other Xbox 360 games, the features of Halo 3 encourage you to play and explore the game to its fullest.