When you are such a small team, there’s no room for the slack. We’ve had a delay in releasing due to an illness, and we apologise for any inconvenience or the delay of the thrill of publication for our authors. Both the publisher Gerry and I know that delight, so we empathise.

We welcome you to Edition 27 and a collection of excellent stories. There’s names that our readers might recognise in our line-up. Russell Hemmell brings us relentless alien mercenaries in Green is the Colour of Doom. Rue Karney is making a name for herself in the Australian speculative fiction community and appears here in the delicious fantasy The Butterfly Pie. Well-known horror name Patrick Freivald darkens an attic doorway in Splinter, making sure no one will ever look at an oak in the same way again. We welcome Ryan Cage and his first publication with the excellent sci-fi, Evie and Zeke. Always a soft spot for the robot survival story. Finally we finish with Austin Hackney’s steampunk, The Wrangler, a reminder that the revolution rarely is bloodless.

We have four reviews of excellent fiction for you. Lee Murray reviews shared world anthology Interspecies: The Inlari Sagas put together by editor Ally Bishop. I review the final instalment of The Passage Trilogy, from Justin Cronin’s City of Mirrors, an apocalyptic vampire narrative. Old Western paranormal novel, The Curse of Jacob Tracy by Holly Messinger is Mysti Parker’s pick for this edition. And in the review from Damien Smith, with another creature-dominated apocalyptic novel, the kaiju reign in Apocalypse Machine by Jeremy Robinson.

We now have the infrastructure in place to begin open submissions again. We will open for short periods to ensure we do not get overwhelmed. A hint for those who are both readers and submitters: as all submissions seem to happen in cycles, what I face is a distinct lack of fantasy. I will also be looking for a longer piece that can be serialised for 2017. Details will appear on our social media sites as they happen, so ensure you have it set-up so you get them first.

Also keep an eye out for the announcement for Star Quake 4: SQ Mag’s Best of 2015 anthology. Final decisions on the line-up should be happening in this month. We are currently working on the cover to show you in the near future.

We’ll follow that up with letting you all know the theme for the Story Quest contest. Nothing in the wings just yet, but Gerry and I hope to have something great for you to work with.

That’s all the news for SQ Mag. But as always, we’d love your donations. They help us innovate, invite the authors whose novels or other fiction you’re enjoying and generally make our way in the world. You’ll find the donate button on any of the SQ Mag pages. Please consider it, to help Australian publishing and international fiction thrive.

And if you like, please share, and invite others to enjoy these fine wordsmiths’ words. You can also sign up to our mailing list to receive your choice of file and get SQ delivered straight to your inbox.

For now, farewell until next edition, where you can continue to look forward to more great speculative fiction from around the world.

Sophie Yorkston
Editor in Chief, SQ Mag