Another Quarter, Another Show

by Don Webb

Not just another season of the same thing. A glance at this issue’s index will convince even veteran readers they’ll need a little orientation. Hang on while we take it from the top.

Slawomir assures us that Iskald will come into his own in a rush this quarter. And that does seem likely: The Three Kings has four more chapters to go. It’s estimated to conclude in about issue 305.
Michael E. Lloyd’s Observation Three debuts in this issue with three chapters and a synopsis of the first two Observation novels. Its sequence of chapters is very carefully planned out, and it’s scheduled to conclude in issue 310.
Bertrand Cayzac’s Floozman is translated by the author himself with help from your Managing Editor. If the whole thing were presented at once, the waiting time would be about a year, and the work required would be nearly impossible.

However, the novel’s episodic nature makes it possible to present it as a series of related stories, and spreading the work out will make the task feasible. Therefore, we may consider the chapters as short stories complete in each issue, much as we did with our time-honored precedent, Roberto Sanhueza’s Katts and Dawgs. Accordingly, a chapter from Floozman will appear between serials from now on.
Shannon J. Prince’s poetic prose in “Why Magicians Have No Epitaphs” is worth the attention. Even though the story’s length would normally qualify for two installments in one issue, I’ve chosen to serialize it in two issues, to give everybody time to think about it as well as to reduce issue length.

And now you know why we have only one short story in this issue. Every category we normally use — except “novella” — is represented in the Index of issue 297. At 19 pages outside of the Departments, the issue is long. But if you expected a let-down after the Second Quarterly Review, you may find a pleasant surprise here and there.