Heroic Fantasy Quarterly–Q33

Hello and welcome to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly’s 33rd issue!  We have scoured the world–again!– from the high shining cities, to the outlying hamlets, to the dark corners of wastes and procured for you the rarest vintage of great fiction and poetry.  Heck, we even added extra poetry!

Before we delve into those treasures, we have an exciting announcement: our kickstarter campaign to fund the Best-of Volume 2 was a roaring success!  We asked for $500 to make it happen and our fans and followers responded with over $2,000 in pledges.  We are amazed and humbled by the amount of support we’ve received!  Rest assured, that even as you read through issue 33, the Best-Of is being composed and will be released with issue #34 in November, in time to take a couple of boxes of them to the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio.

On to issue 33!

 

Fiction Contents

Between Sea and Flame, by Evan Dicken. Aztec adventuress Hummingbird is back, facing murderous armor-clad invaders, the demons of her own past, and a multi-dimensional threat that would make HP Lovecraft blush.

I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, by Raphael Ordoñez,  Down and out Conquistador Francisco Carvajal returns to our digital pages.  There is something foul in the lands, something trying to push its way into our world from the great mountain Akihwa, and Carvajal is chosen by the Corn Maidens to deal with it.

Rakefire, by Jason Carney.  We delve deep into the sorcery side of sword and sorcery on this one, Trokarus must find a rogue hedge mage to find the rogue wizard who trained him.  Easy enough, if only you can capture the hedge mage.

 

Poetry Contents

Colder than Mars, by Andrew Crabtree. Mars is a complicated god, and even though the story always ends the same, those who serve him are complicated, too.

The Pirate Queen Ching Shih Confronts Her Doppleganger, by Kendall Evans. In this long-form poem, things get weird onboard the The Flying Dragon when a mysterious novice turns out to be way more than what she appears.

The Dolmen, by Michael Tilbury. The gate between the living and the dead is sometimes hard to resist passing through.

 

Artwork

Jereme Peabody is back with “Epic Dragon Battle”.

Jerome is a software engineer in the DC area and is also a freelance concept artist working mostly on video games and books.  He started his artistic career dabbling with sculpting, pencils, and even still-life oil painting.  As tablets became available, he crossed over from traditional art to digital by first digitally painting still-lifes, then through experimentation and practice, transitioned to landscapes and fantasy.

Skye Hembree is back with artwork for “Between Sea and Flame”.  She’s had illustrations with us before in “Lethe’s Cup and the White Sword” and “Shadows in Sakamura”.

Raphael Ordoñez works his visual magic into his written magic for “I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds”. Raphael Ordoñez is a mildly autistic writer and circuit-riding college professor residing in the southwest Texas hinterlands. His short stories have appeared in several magazines, and his paleozoic adventure fantasy novels, Dragonfly and The King of Nightspore’s Crown, the first two in a planned tetralogy, are available from Hythloday House. He blogs about fantasy, writing, art, and logic at Cosmic Antipodes , and his story “Heart of Tayshyas” (with his own illustration) was published in HFQ #31

Miguel Santos is back with the artwork for “Rakefire”.  His illustrations at HFQ can be found in  “Seven Moves on an Ordrulk Board”, “Spatha Stercae“ and “Seraph

 

 

Goings On

David Farney:   David is working under deep cover for HFQ.  Deep Cover.

Adrian Simmons:  Adrian’s been multi-tasking like there is no tomorrow.  He’s got stories coming out at Strange Constellations, Lackington’s, and Giganotosaurus.  He’s also been reviewing classic SF that is as old as he is.

William Ledbetter:  Since issue #32, William Ledbetter has won a Nebula Award for his novelette “The Long Fall Up”, he has a new short story out in the current issue (July/August) of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “In a Wide Sky, Hidden,” his story “Tethers” is now out in The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF from Bean Books and he recently sold a story that will be in a future issue of Analog. He will also be a panelist at World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon 75) in Helsinki, Finland and at World Fantasy Con in San Antonio, TX.

James Rowe:  Literary wise, the last few months for James have mostly been filled up with the normal affair of routine publishing as a Frequent Contributor over at www.songsoferetz.com. However, on a much more important note, professor Rowe (his title outside the world of sword and sorcery) has secured his first peer-reviewed scholarly article in philosophy. Appearing in The Philosophical Forum Volume 48, Issue 2, Summer 2017 is his “Time and Change”.  In it, James rejects both McTaggart’s idea that time and change are identical, as well as Shoemaker’s contention that changeless time is possible. His thesis is that though a changeless universe would have to be atemporal, it is not that time is change, but rather allows for its possibility. Were time to not exist, there’d be no place for change to occur, in that there’d be no future moment which would allow the change to occur. Nevertheless, as time allows for the possibility of change, were this possibility to never manifest over what would’ve otherwise been an infinite span of time (the changeless universe), it would not exist in that universe, as a change that does not manifest over that period would not be a possibility, but an impossibility. In other words, time facilitates the possibility of change, but change is necessary for there to be time given that facilitation. This suggests that time is intimately linked with the notion of possibility, such that a universe consisting purely of necessity would be atemporal. You can read the article over at The Philosophical Forum which is free to access if you have an academic account at a college library, otherwise it requires a purchase/rental of the article.

Barbara Barrett: Barbara managed to soak the damage from a major open-heart surgery and is deep into the recovery phase.

 

HFQ Best-of Anthology Volume II.

As mentioned, our kickstarter was a roaring success! Work on the Best-of #2 continues and all the omens are good that we will hit our release date of November.

 

Fellow-Travelers!

This quarter HFQ is happy to boost the signal on books by a pair of authors whose work will be in the volume II anthology—Michelle Muenzler’s “The Hills of Meat and the Forest of Bone”  is everything you’d think it would be, plus a grumpy shark-man!

J.S. Bangs’ “The Wave Speaker”, is the recently-released prelude to his Powers of Amur trilogy.  Pirates!  Wave-walking women!  Also, sharks.

 

 

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