We’d like to welcome you back in 2017, to our new quarterly format, a step-up in the world of short story publishing. We’re now publishing 8 stories in an edition, and offering more incentive for writers with a higher payment per word.

With our new format, we won’t be losing any of what made and makes this magazine great. We’re still committed to varied genres and publishing authors from diverse voices and places. The announcement of our special edition will come very soon. So we can focus on that, we will be closing general submissions for a short period of time to open the themed edition. However, we will still be looking for long fiction, and for the time being returning authors and resubmissions will remain open.

This new edition is heavy on fantasy; the escapism to which the world turns to. However, we think that there are multiple pieces to appeal to every reader of all genres represented by Speculative Fiction.

We welcome back Rhoads Brazos with another deeply mythical tale, The Essence of Flow. This follows up his highly successful story with us in 2014’s Special Edition: Australiana, Tread Upon the Brittle Shell, and which was taken up by Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror Volume 7.

I am also delighted to welcome authors new to SQ Mag. We begin with a deeply felt tale of loss and drifting apart from steamy North Queensland in Michelle E. Goldsmith’s Seeds of the Strangling Vine. Anjali Patel brings us to the heart of a family where a girl is slowing being stripped of her magic in Who Blooms in Darkness.

In Conflict Calories, Fredrick Obermeyer’s alternate world has the people feeding on the difficult feelings around them. With Delicious, Delicious, Karl Bunker takes an ordinary story of being out of your normal world and the newness of desire, turning it into a strange place in the morphogenic freeform town of Hong Kong.

Casting Nets throws a delightful little spell on our hearts with the tale of young love forbidden, nested with magic in Rebecca Fraser’s seaside world. Blaize M. Kaye takes All Your Questioned Answered on a little sojourn on what questions in our own lives would we seek the truth. The last story of this edition, The Devil’s Bloom by David Cleden, investigates the little dark mischiefs to the blacker stains upon our souls, and what it means to be ready to come home again.

We have some excellent reviews from our regular reviewers. Damien reviews Wall of Storms, second in Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, an epic silkpunk fantasy. I review the fourth book of E.J. Newman’s Split Worlds, A Little Knowledge, an intriguing urban fantasy series crashing between the modern world and the Victorian and repressed Aquae Sulis. Lee reviews a short from James Rollins’ military Sigma Force universe, Crash and Burn, offering some shadows to offset the muzzle-flash action. Mysti finishes our reviews for this edition with the science fiction Fate of Perfection from K.F. Breen’s Finding Paradise series, in dystopian worlds where conglomerates rule supreme.

The glorious artwork on our cover is this ezine’s regular and valued contributor, author and artist Tais Teng. Tais has contributed covers to Editions 09, 19, 27 and 12, the beautiful cover which went on to feature on Star Quake: Best of SQ Mag 2014. To see more of his work, head to his portfolio at DeviantArt: http://taisteng.deviantart.com/.

As always, we’re grateful to our contributors, advertisers and sponsors. We’ll have some more options for the following in the wake of our quarterly transition, so keep an eye out. Donations allow us to be able to keep putting this on, which we assure you, we do for the love and not for the money.

Soon we will also be looking for more readers for the ezine. If you would like to volunteer to read submissions, keep an eye on the social media pages for more information, coming soon.

Thanks again for stopping by. We hope you enjoy this edition, and as always, we ask you to share, review and help more dedicated genre readers find us.

Sophie Yorkston
Editor in Chief, SQ Mag