Amazing fiction! Insightful reviews! A self-indulgent editorial! Yes, it’s
Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #46! This issue features alphabetically-ordered stories by Gary Budgen, Mitchell Edgeworth, Josie Gowler, Stephen Palmer, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson and Ross Gresham, plus eighteen reviews from Stephen Theaker, Jacob Edwards and Douglas J. Ogurek. Our spacechristmassy cover art is by Howard Watts.
Our print format changes a bit with this issue, shaving an inch off in each direction. Not sure if we'll stick with the new size until we see how the printing goes, but as ever the goal is to make the publication easier to produce and easier to read. I hope you'll like it.
Links
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on CreateSpace
Epub version (free)
Mobi version (free)
PDF version (free)
Kindle edition:
on Amazon.co.uk
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The ebook is also available on
Feedbooks and
Lulu (both free)
All 45 back issues are also available for free download, in various formats.
Contributors
Charles Wilkinson’s short stories have appeared in
Best Short Stories 1990,
Best English Short Stories 2,
Midwinter Mysteries and
London Magazine. A collection,
The Pain Tree and Other Stories, was published by London Magazine Editions.
Ag & Au, a pamphlet of his poems, recently appeared from Flarestack Poets, Birmingham. Previously in
Theaker’s: “Notes on the Bone” (
#41) and “Notes from the Undergrowth” (
#44). This issue: “Petrol-Saved”.
Douglas J. Ogurek reviews
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire for us this time. His work has appeared in the
BFS Journal,
The Literary Review,
Morpheus Tales,
Gone Lawn, and several anthologies. He lives in a Chicago suburb with the woman whose husband he is and their five pets. His website:
www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.
Gary Budgen’s fiction has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including
Interzone,
Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (“Through the Ages”,
#43) and
Morpheus Tales. Recently he has had stories in the anthologies
Where Are We Going? and
Urban Green Man. He is a member of
London Clockhouse Writers. Read more at
http://garybudgen.wordpress.com. In this issue: “Black Ribbon”.
Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford who provides the fantastic cover art for this issue. In fact, he provided it over a year ago, for the issue originally intended for Christmas 2012!
Check out his Deviantart page.
Jacob Edwards reviews
About Time,
Computing with Quantum Cats, The Day of the Doctor and
Gravity in this issue. His heart belongs to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, but we’re happy to be his holiday romance. This writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist’s site:
www.jacobedwards.id.au.
Jessy Randall’s stories, poems, and other things have appeared in
Asimov’s, Flurb, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, LQQK, McSweeney’s, and
Star*Line. Her website is
personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall/. Her story in this issue: “The Night of Red Butterflies”.
Josie Gowler specialises in writing weird tales set in the English East Anglian Fens, and science fiction and fantasy short stories; she has most fun when these all overlap. She’s been published in
365 Tomorrows,
Lorelei Signal,
Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (“Soldier”, all the way back in
#28) and
Bewildering Tales. She is a Napoleonic re-enactor and is currently working on a trashy coming-of-age space opera. Her story in this issue is “The Lazarus Loophole”.
Mitchell Edgeworth lives in Melbourne, Australia, and his fiction has been published in
The Battered Suitcase and
SQ Mag, as well as here. He keeps a blog at
www.grubstreethack.wordpress.com and tweets as
@mitchedgeworth. “Customs” is the fourth in his
Black Swan series to appear in these pages. Like everything we publish, it can be read quite happily in isolation, but if you want to find out how the
Black Swan got off the ground, see his stories in
#40 (“Homecoming”),
#42 (“Drydock”) and
#43 (“Flight”).
Ross Gresham teaches at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. His stories have previously appeared in
#34 (“Name the Planet”),
#41 (“Milo Don’t Count Coup”) and
#44 (“Milo on Fire”). His story in this issue is “Wild Seed”.
Stephen Palmer is the author of seven published novels, including
Memory Seed and
Glass (Orbit),
Muezzinland, and
Urbis Morpheos (PS Publishing). His short fiction has been published by NewCon Press, Wildside Press, SF Spectrum, Rocket Science,
Eibonvale Press,
Unspoken Water, Infinity Plus and Solaris, plus two more currently unmentionable. Ebooks of all his novels have recently been published by Infinity Plus Ebooks, who will also be publishing his forthcoming novel
Hairy London. He lives and works in Shropshire, UK. His story in this issue: “The Mines of Sorrow”.
Stephen Theaker reviews all sorts of things in this issue. He even liked some of them. Further to last issue’s editorial, he got up to 107 consecutive days of writing at least 250 words a day (getting up to an average of 837), before post-Nanowrimo fatigue kicked in and brought the run to a halt on December 5. His work has also appeared in
Black Static,
Interzone,
Prism, the
BFS Journal, and the letters page of the
NME. (He wrote to defend the authenticity of the Manic Street Preachers, comparing them favourably in that regard with bands like Curve. Time has – as usual! – proven him quite right.)
) is the first of the series I’ve played, and since I don’t play games on the PC, the Xbox 360 version is a new game to me. It’s an isometric dungeon crawler, an action RPG where your heroes run around semi-randomly generated environments bashing hordes of creatures, fulfilling simple fetch-quests. Players can choose from wizard, demon hunter, barbarian, witch doctor and monk, and from male and female versions of each. The setting is pretty much indistinguishable from other fantasy games, with your regulation ghosts, zombies, skeletons etc to fight. Sometimes you get a funny feeling you’re just playing Dragon Age: Origins or Oblivion from a different point of view, though some laser-like magical powers would be more at home in Halo.
