Theaker's Quarterly Fiction: Year
Four (#15-20) (30 December 2007)
Our omnibus edition of all of 2007's issues of TQF is now available,
featuring 46 short stories and novellas, one and a half novels, one
six-part serial, five editorials, one manifesto, seven news items, one
lost classic of the Silver Age, ten reviews, one obituary, and six comic
strips. Authors in this volume include Wayne Summers, Dan Kopcow, Jeff
Crouch, Richard K Lyon, Andrew J Offut, Howard Phillips, Mark E Deloy,
Laura Bickle, Jeff Crook, Benjamin Spurduto and Eric R Lowther.
You can see the cover on our website
here, along with the
previous bound volumes we've done, or you could just head straight over to
see it on Lulu. Only
£8.99 at the time of writing, which is pretty good
value for 460 adventure-packed pages! – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20
(29 December 2007)
In the twentieth issue of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction we present
the very substantial horror of "The Hatchling: Post-Natal Paranoia" by
John Greenwood. Cultists, monsters and secret government ministries - what
else do you need? "Contrarieties" by Bruce Hesselbach continues his
charming series of Tales of Yxning. The issue is rounded out by the final
part of After All, by Michael Wyndham Thomas. There's also a bit of
apologising from me about the poor quality service I'm providing as a book
reviewer. It isn't quite half the length of the previous
issue, but it is a little bit shorter. See
TQF#20. – SWT
November Spawned 2007: a
Novel-Writing Handout (26
October 2007)
I've left this a bit late to be of any use to anyone else for this
year's NaNoWriMo, but the new
Novel-Writing Handout is now
available. It's not that different to last year's - just a few tweaks here
and there, plus a plug of course for the incredible earth-shaking literary
endeavour that is Shortschafe 2007!
Everyone coming to our kick-off meeting in Birmingham will get one of
these, plus official NaNoWriMo stickers and tattoos. To see more about
nano-events in Birmingham, see our
local forum. – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #19
(8 October 2007)
A few days late, but it's finally here!
There's lots of great stuff in this issue, and it's all divided up into
neat little sections so you can head straight for the stuff that interests
you most!
First there's a dash of horror, to reflect the fact that it's a
Halloween special: Pumpkin Jack, by Laura Bickle, and The Walled Garden by
Wayne Summers.
Then there's lots and lots of fantasy: Rural Legend by Eric R Lowther,
The Iron Mercenary: A Tale of Tiana, by Richard K Lyon & Andrew J Offutt,
When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine, by Sam Leng, The Remarkable Life
of Yren Higbe by Bruce Hesselbach, and the fifth instalment of After All,
by Michael Wyndham Thomas.
Then we have a bit of science fiction: The Broadest Divide by David
McGillveray, and Newton Braddell: a Detour by John Greenwood.
And though it didn't fit anywhere else, there's also a bit of bizarro
from Dan Kopcow, Who Picked the Pope’s Nose?
Finally there's a review of Zencore!, or as much of one as I
could do, having lost the book a couple of weeks ago.
Another great issue of TQF! Read yourself some
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #19!
This was one heck of a tough one to get finished, so
expect the next issue to be half the size! – SWT
British Fantasy Society –
Birmingham Open Night (15
September 2007)
There will be an open night of the
British Fantasy Society
this Saturday in Birmingham, the home of Silver Age Books!
Like our own Theaker's Quarterly Fiction, the
British Fantasy Society covers all types of fantastic literature,
including science fiction, horror and fantasy. So if you are a writer,
artist or publisher with an interest in those genres this would be a great
time to meet other like-minded people.
Anyone is allowed to attend, whether they are
members of the Society or not, and attendance is free. It isn't
particularly intended as a means of enticing new members, so if you have
no intention of joining, don't feel at all that you shouldn't come.
Some special guests will be attending too:
The Write Fantastic, a
group of crusading fantasists including Chaz Brenchley, Juliet E McKenna,
Deborah J Miller, Stan Nicholls and Jessica Rydill.
The event is taking place from 6.30 pm at
the Cornerhouse pub, 110 Edmund Street/Newhall
Street, Birmingham, B3 3PU, and of course there will be a minor SAB
presence, standing quietly in the corner and probably not talking to
anyone! – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #18
(4 August 2007)
As I say in the editorial for this issue, the rock
just won’t stop!
This issue of the munificent and magnificent TQF
contains the following stories: "Ananke", by Jeff Crook (fantasy in the
high style); "Winter’s Warm Blood" by Mark E Deloy (horror with a feminine
side); "Live to Be Hunted" by Sean & Craig Davis (100% masculine);
"Glimmerick", by Michael McNichols (featuring the magical tree of god!);
"La Tierra de la Sangre", by Benjamin Spurduto (pirate-crazy); "The
Tragical History of Weebly Pumrod, Witch Hunter", by Bruce Hesselbach (the
world of Yxning); "After All", by Michael Wyndham Thomas (antepenultimate
engagement); more Newton Braddell by John Greenwood; and reviews of the
Transformers movie and Apex #10!
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #18 is
longer than #17, and contains nothing by Howard Phillips – you can't lose!
– SWT
A Blog About Steven Gilligan
(8 June 2007)
I'm glad Frank Black chose this decade to
go country and western. Fast Man Raider Man is really hitting the
spot for me right now.
Anyway, people are sharing their
memories of our old friend on a
blog about Steven
Gilligan.
In the spirit of people remembering how deliberately provocative and
shocking he could be, intensely embarrassing though I always found it,
here's a joke about his death:
"Steven's in a better place now."
"Well, the morgue is a step up from his previous apartment."
– SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #17
(4 June 2007)
Our biggest issue yet is now out! Eighty pages of the strangest and
best in fantastic literature!
Read the conclusion of The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta, and the
next instalments of After All, Helen and Her Magic Cat and Newton
Braddell's Inconclusive Researches! Join us for our first dip into the
worlds of Diane Andrews, Dan Kopcow, Richard K Lyon and
Jeff Crouch! Read reviews of games and movies that were out months ago!
And read our manifesto, which should go some way to explaining why we roll
in the square-wheeled way we do!
Theaker's Quarterly
Fiction #17 kicks out the jams, and spreads them on toast! –
SWT
Steven Gilligan (1973–2007)
(1 June 2007)
I can’t quite remember when I first met
Steven Gilligan. It might
have been at the school library, where I soon joined him, John Greenwood
and Sam Dixon as a student librarian. It might have been after someone
suggested I look in on a writers’ group (made up mainly of the same
people) that was meeting at lunchtimes. Or I might just have met him in
the hall at lunchtime one day. However it happened, it was a lunchtime,
and he made an immediate impact on me, and we quickly became involved in a
dozen silly projects together –
we performed sketches at the school shows, started a band (Master Zangpan
and the Mechanical Housewife), tried to start a marbles revival, sold
trumped-up horoscopes, offered a ghost hunting service, created New Words,
launched Silver Age Books, published our novels, and most recently we
created November Spawned and Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, to both of which
he made notable contributions.
In amongst all that, we laughed a lot, talked a lot about computer
games, tv and music, and drank a bit from time to time. He introduced me
to Hellblazer, HP Lovecraft, Warhammer, Primal Scream, My Bloody
Valentine, Joy Division, Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out, and a million other
things I love so much for which I’m forgetting to give him credit, and
took me to my first ever gigs (The Wedding Present and The Wonder Stuff).
He gave me confidence in whatever I wanted to do, gave me a kick up the
butt when I needed it, taught me the importance of the punk rock spirit in
everyday life, and did a brilliant job as the best man at my chaotic
wedding.
Anyway, he’s gone now –
he died last week. For the rest of my life it’ll feel like something’s
missing. My daughter’s lost someone who would have been the best “bad
influence” uncle a kid could ask for, and I’ve lost a best friend. He was
also the best gift-giver I've ever known – birthdays and Christmases are
going to really suck now.
We have some of his Helen and Her Magic Cat strips in hand, so his
presence will be felt directly in the magazine for a little while yet, and
indirectly for as long as it lasts. If we can, we’ll also put together a
new collection of his work at some point.
I think he would have appreciated the way I found out that he was a
goner.
Sitting in the lobby of his tower block, waiting for news from the
police who had gone to open and investigate his room, I heard someone, a
cleaner I think, yelling, “Have you heard? Someone on the first floor has
kicked the bucket!”
I couldn't help laughing, because
that’s exactly how Steven would have wanted it.
– SWT
The Big Five-Double-O!
(23 May 2007)
It's hard for me to believe, but the free pdf of TQF#16, helped no
doubt by John Shanks' intensely attractive cover artwork, has now been
downloaded over 500 times!
Wow... That's something like 500 times as many downloads as there were
of TQF#1 when it came out! Thanks to everyone who has taken a look. It's
really nice to know that people are taking an interest in what we're
doing.
Thanks too to websites like
Ralan's Specfic
Webstravaganza,
Duotrope, and the
British Fantasy Society, who have hosted links to the site, to
Whispers of Wickedness, where a
brief discussion of TQF led by
Lawrence
Dagstine gave our download numbers an astonishing bump with every
fresh post, to all the small press friends we've made on
MySpace,
and of course to all the other authors and artists who have trumpeted
their appearances in our magazine with such strange pride!
This year has been TQF's coming-out party, and it's been great to find
such a welcoming and friendly community out there in the wider world of
the sf and fantasy small press.
It's been a revelation to find how many free tools are at our disposal,
too, so thanks to PayPal,
Lulu,
Amazon and Cafepress for making it so easy to hitch a ride on the long
tail!
Finally, thanks as well to the magnificent and inspired folks at
NaNoWriMo, because if I hadn't been
writing a daft novel every year, I wouldn't have founded a daft magazine
to put them in! Their can-do, fun attitude informs every aspect of TQF. –
SWT
Pay for a TQF Subscription and
Back Issues with PayPal! (1 May
2007)
If you've ever fancied subscribing to TQF, and it wasn't the
horrendously high price of £23.99 that put you
off, but rather the complications involved in leaving the internet to
write a cheque, help is now at hand! You can now buy a subscription using
PayPal!
Go for it! Pay the mortgage next month!
We've also found a couple of back issues in the storerooms, and dug
them to go on sale – #4,
#11,
#12 and #13 – though in every case
it would be much better value to buy the bound volumes! Back issues from
#15 on remain available from our
Lulu Store,
thanks to the miracle of modern technology (and the postage costs have
recently taken a bit of a tumble, too)! – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #16
(4 April 2007)
After four issues in four months, we're back on track – issue sixteen
of TQF is out on time!
What's more, it's the longest issue of TQF yet published, running to 64
amazing pages! Every one of them is jam-packed with adventure, terror,
laughter and awe-inspiring greatness! The creative renaissance of Howard
Phillips continues apace, we have new contributors from the United States,
another Lost Classic, and, best of all, adverts for the British Fantasy
Society, Trevor Denyer's Midnight Street, and
Homegrown Goodness, the magnificent website of our cover artist, John
Shanks.
Go and read Theaker's Quarterly Fiction
#16 – it's free to download, and it doesn't come cheaper than that.
All it will cost you... IS YOUR MIND! – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #15:
Spring Issue! (5 March 2007)
Issue fifteen of TQF is out now! The effort of preparing all 23 stories
for publication has wearied me to the point that I can hardly find any
more words to say!
We have called this incredible issue "The
Silver Age Treasury of Fantastic Literature".
The idea was to fill an entire issue with single-page stories – in the
end, many of them ran a bit longer than that, but in every case the
extended word count is undeniably essential!
What's more, I've just realised that this is the first TQF since #8 to
see any fiction published under my name, so it's worth reading for that
reason alone! – SWT
Sign Up For the Silver Age
Bulletin! (27 February 2007)
A side-effect of setting ourselves up at CafePress is that we can now
use their mailing service to let you know whenever a new issue of
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction is available!
Check out the sidebar on the left to sign up.
We will only email you once for each issue, making six emails a year in
total – assuming the frequency of TQF publication doesn't go up! – so we
won't be clogging up your inbox. – SWT
Silver Age Books: the CafePress
Store! (27 February 2007)
I realise all these rapid developments at Silver Age Books may be
taking some of you by surprise, after years of relative inertia, but hold
on to your hats: there's a new innovation! We've just opened our own store
at CafePress. At the moment the selection is limited to a range of
excellent white t-shirts bearing the Silver Age Books logo, but if you
check it out now and again new stuff should turn up on there fairly
regularly now: the
Silver
Age Books Cafepress Store. – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction – the
Bound Volumes! (25 February
2007)
Now available from our Lulu store - bound volumes of all issues of
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction to date.
Year One
covers #1-4, from 2004,
Year Two
covers #5-8, from 2005, and
Year Three
covers #9-14. Eagle-eyed shoppers will notice that the prices for the
bound volumes compare very favourably with the prices for the single
issues, so these are real bargains. We plan to continue putting out a
bound volume at the end of every year – so if you want to "wait for the
trade" next year, that's fine by us! Each issue will continue to be
available to read for free on this site. – SWT
Lulu SAB Storefront Opens!
(20 February 2007)
It's technology a-gogo in Silver Age Towers
this week. Not only have we successfully (so far as we can tell) upgraded
to Windows Vista, complete with snazzy window switching, we have set up
shop over at www.lulu.com, long-time
friends of all November novelists. At present we have just made TQF#14
available to order, but who knows what might follow? Visit the
Silver Age Books Storefront
regularly to find out! – SWT
Empty Bag EP Comes to Light! Rock
Historians Rejoice! (16 February
2007)
One of the great items missing from this
website was the superb EP recorded by
Master
Zangpan and the Mechanical Housewife (guest stars in the first ever
publication to bear the name Silver Age Books,
Professor Challenger in Space) back in 1990. Now, thanks to my mum
finding a copy among her old cassettes, we have it, and you can download
it today! Visit our
MZATMH
page pronto! – SWT
On Valentine's Day, Become an
Official Friend of Silver Age Books!
(14 February 2007)
As ever, Silver Age Books is at the
forefront of new technology, and with that in mind we have created our own
page on MySpace - see here
Silver Age Books on MySpace. It is not intended to replace this fine,
fine website of ours, of course not, but rather to complement it. You can
go there to add us to your friends list, pictures you've already seen
right here, and, from time to time, we might even add something inane to
the Silver Age Books blog!
Get over there now: you don't know what you are missing, and you won't
know how little you were missing until you go and see! – SWT
A Robot's Adventure (14 February
2007)
We've always had a couple of movies
available on the Silver Age Books website, but there may be an increasing
number of SAB projects along those lines, now that Youtube's around, ready
to do the file hosting for us. For starters, here's a very short and silly
item produced by our publisher himself,
A Robot's Adventure, a
very, very basic animation designed to make his youngster laugh (hence the
credits to "Daddy"). Don't expect very much from it, and you will probably
still be disappointed!
We have something a bit more ambitious
planned for later in the year. – HP
Out Now: Theaker's Quarterly
Fiction #14 – the New Year
Special (28 January 2007)
This was intended to be the Christmas
special, but it feels a bit late for that now! Never mind, like every
issue of TQF it is still extremely special, regardless of which calendar
event we link it to! This issue rounds out our third year of publication
with a lengthy episode in the annals of Valiant Razalia, by Michael
Wyndham Thomas. Go now and read Theaker's
Quarterly Fiction #14.
This will be the last issue of TQF in its
current format, at least as far as paper readers go (online readers will
not notice much of a change, other than the illustrations getting a bit
bigger, perhaps, since the original files will still be A4-sized for now).
From #15 the printed magazine will be A5-sized, allowing for cheaper
printing, cheaper postage and hence cheaper subscriptions! We're still
planning to publish six issues, but they may be a little longer than has
been the case to date. We'll have to see! – SWT
Eighteen Days into ShortsChafe
2007! (18 January 2007)
If this year, again, you just can't wait
for National Novel Writing Month
(aka NaNoWriMo) to get started, have a go at
ShortsChafe 2007, the
Short Story Challenge for Earthlings. The
challenge once more is to write a short story every day. It doesn't matter
when you start, but you have to do it every day from then on. Your final
score is the number of consecutive days on which you manage to write a
complete story of at least 600 words. – SWT
New Copy Deadlines Available! (18
January 2007)
The deadlines for submitting copy for this
year's six issues of TQF are now up on the site - see the
Submission Guidelines
and Deadlines page. We are looking for anything with a hint of
derring-do, or a smidgen of blood-curdling horror, or a milligram of
science. Westerns, horror, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, adventure
– it's all good. Put your meat in the grinder! – SWT
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction
#13 Brings the Pain! (8 January 2007)
I might have known our good timekeeping
wouldn't last! After two issues that came out on time,
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #13 is finally here, but it's wagging its
tail like a happy little puppy, and really sorry about having taken its
time to turn up!
This is yet another "best issue ever", with
the first brilliant adaptation of a Space University Trent episode,
followed by a Lost Classic of the Silver Age, a stunning chapter of the
previously unsuspected Mushrooms from Infinity!
Thank all that is good that one of the
Silver Age family got lost and ended up in that alternative dimension, in
which our publishing house was launched decades before the parallel event
happened in our quotidian plane.
Issue fourteen should be along quite
quickly, so start reading this one right away! – SWT
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