No one ever tells you that when you begin work how many decisions you are going to have to make every day. It also isn’t revealed how hard those choices are going to be.

When Gerry asked me to head up this e-zine (and its predecessor SQ Magazine), I didn’t realise that I would be making tough decisions on fantastic stories all the time. It is agony sometimes to take only a selection of the shorts that come through to the submissions page. As the quality keeps improving, it only gets harder.

You will find this edition has a definite bent towards horror and supernatural themes. It is interesting how a run of a particular speculative fiction theme will be sent to us, from all over the globe.  In SQ Mag 3, we have authors from the US, the UK, Ireland and Italy. We have stories of creatures of space, long-held bitter feuds, love, loss and murder. We all have really enjoyed putting this group together and hope you will appreciate them too.

Some options are easy to jump on. We have expanded our review selection, building on the fantastic foundation of Mysti Parker’s excellent reviews. This time she looks at Ashfall, a teen dystopian fiction by Mike Mullin. Our new contributor is Damien Smith, a reviewer whose work you might know from Specusphere. He reviews Specusphere’s Mythic Resonance, the reboot of well known myths written by some fantastic authors, edited by Stephen Thompson. I am also dipping my toe in with a review of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance, the last book in the Inheritance cycle, or better known as the final in the series of books started with Eragon. But, a new development, is a review of Joss Whedon’s  Cabin In the Woods, a horror film with a difference, and a very limited release. We hope to have more of these to come over the year.

Please also take some time to have a good look at our cover for this edition, called Songline Rangers by the fantastic John Hughes. Not only is he an editor, but he also writes and creates 3D images in his own time. A fellow Australian, we really appreciate this amazing cover and look forward to working further with him in the future. Please check out his website here.

One last point for me. I want to thank everyone who takes the time to contribute to our e-zine. We do this for the love, and not the money. Each image bar one, each story, is unpaid for. The time of anyone at SQ Mag is freely given, because we love encouraging writers and artists in this industry. We hope that you will subscribe to the e-zine and share it with others. If you can contribute, it would be so appreciated, but if you can’t, please help promote us to increase our exposure and reach.

So until next time friends, keep up the reading and creating, and we will see you in September.

Sophie Yorkston

Editor-in-Chief, SQ Mag