Greetings from the SQ Mag team, and thank you for joining us again for Edition 25.

We’ve the pleasure of hosting a piece of the indomitable Mike Resnick, veteran and lord of the science fiction genre. We’d like to welcome him to SQ Mag as our featured author. Mike’s piece, Occult.net, is a great snapshot of a writer who will do anything to succeed. Anything.

Our line-up for the edition includes authors both new and old friends. Kristin Janz’s Thou Hast by Moonlight at Her Window Sung drops you into another world, seductive in its beauty. S. Marston returns to SQ with Mwah, with a programmer savant whose past has followed him online. We also welcome Deborah Sheldon with What the Sea Wants, a tale of wordless terror on the high seas. PJ Keuning spins us a delightful steampunk tale of life in the airborne cities of the UK in Radar Love.

This edition includes winners from the 2015 Story Quest Contest, Jason Lairamore and Meghean Major. Jason has previously published with SQ Mag, and we again thoroughly enjoyed his tied third place sci-fi submission for the contest, A Hero for His People. Meghean’s delightful Victorian steampunk detective romp, An Almost Tidy Case, persuaded the judges of its worth. We’re delighted to bring you these final pieces from the contest.

We would like to welcome Lee Murray, with her first review for the ezine. Lee has reviewed Grant Stone’s collected speculative fiction work, Everything is Fine. Damien Smith reviews War God Rising, humorous sword-and-sorcery by Tim Marquitz. I review Binti, Nnedi Okorafor’s recent socio-political science fiction novella.

Another first for the edition, you might have enjoyed the excellent artwork adorning this edition’s cover. We are grateful to have Duncan Long’s exquisite work front and centre for Edition 25 and hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Don’t forget that the special edition (May 2016) is open for submissions on the theme of Symbiosis. We want harmony, we want a need that can’t be lived without. You can find the details on our Submissions page.

We’re also very excited for Suzanne J. Willis, whose story Husk and Sheaf from Edition 22 has been nominated for the Best Fantasy Short Aurealis Award. The Aurealis Awards are Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards, a complement to the Ditmar and Shadows Awards for respective areas of the genre. We congratulate all the authors nominated for the above awards, particularly the talented authors who have presented their work here as well.

We encourage all our readers eligible to vote in the Ditmar Awards to do so. The reading and writing communities being involved in these processes are crucial.

I will be attending Contact 2016, the 55th annual Australian science fiction convention in Brisbane, Australia at the end of March. I hope to see many of our Brisbane readers and authors there. There won’t be a booth unfortunately, but we will let you know of any other cons we will be attending during the year.

So I’ll leave you to the joy of reading this new edition. As always, we hope you will appreciate these moments of other worlds as much as we do.

Sophie
Editor, SQ Mag