Tory Hoke (sub-Q‘s publisher) and I (its editor-in-chief) have been talking about the future of the magazine for several months now. In the end, we decided to put the magazine on “indefinite hiatus,” which is the term genre magazines typically use for “closing down for the near future but we don’t like to say we’re […]

Isabel J. Kim is a law student by day and a writer-artist electric hybrid by night. She’s been published in The Penn Review and her art has been covered in Hyperallergic. Find her work at isabel.kim and her on twitter at @isabeljkim This interview was conducted over email in February of 2020 sub-Q Magazine: What’s […]

Sharang Biswas is an artist, writer, and award-winning game designer based in New York. In addition to essays and stories for Sub Q, Sharang has written for First Person Scholar, Unwinnable, and ZAM. He’s currently working on “Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games”, to be published by Pelgrane Press. Twitter: @SharangBiswas […]

George Lockett is a London-based writer of fiction and video games. His short fiction has appeared in such places as Fireside Magazine, The Colored Lens, and Making Monsters: A Speculative and Classical Anthology. He has written for and consulted on a variety of other interactive projects, including VR, AR, and narrative video games. George is […]

Monica Valentinelli is an author and narrative designer. An industry veteran with almost twenty years’ experience, Monica has worked on dozens of hobby games and has told numerous stories for tabletop RPGs and supplements, card games, interactive fiction (or LitRPGs), miniature games, mobile games, and more. Find out more at booksofm.com. This interview was conducted via […]

Jei D. Marcade is a Korean-American speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, PodCastle, and Strange Horizons. They can be found haunting jeidmarcade.com or tweeting sporadically @JeiDMarcade. This interview was conducted over e-mail in November of 2019. sub-Q Magazine: You write short stories as well as fiction of the interactive variety. Do […]

Astrid Dalmady is a venezuelan writer and narrative designer. You can find her work at AstridDalmady.com. Astrid is the author of Night Guard / Morning Star from our November issue, which was first published in 2019’s IFComp. This interview was conducted over e-mail in November of 2019. Sub-Q Magazine: What interests you the most about […]

It’s December. Here in the northern hemisphere, that means cold weather and more hours of darkness. To celebrate the season, we’ve loaded this issue chock full searches for things that go bump in the night. Jei D. Marcade’s “That Night at Henry’s Place” takes on horror movie tropes as you search for a missing friend […]

It’s the beginning of November, and that can only mean one thing: NaNoWriMo! No, wait, that’s not what it means in this context (although if it’s on your agenda we wish you the best!). Let’s try again: subQjam 2019 is on the horizon! That’s right, folks. Following the success of last year’s subQjam (theme: love), […]

This month we’re very excited to bring you all “The Soft Rumor of Spreading Weeds,” a new game from Porpentine Charity Heartscape. This story is set in the same universe as “With Those We Love Alive,” and while you don’t need to have played that one to enjoy this, doing so might increase your enjoyment. […]

Intrigue! Banter! The promise of danger around every corner! These things—along with memorable characters and unusual settings—are some of the things that always make me stay up late reading. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two games in this month’s issue also have these things in common. In Eleanor Hingley’s “A Tragedy of Manners,” you’re thrown into […]

Eleanor Hingley has been writing and gaming, and writing about gaming, for longer than she cares to remember. Find more of her interactive fiction at https://magpie-elle.itch.io/ and non-interactive fiction at https://shadowplaytheatre.wordpress.com/. She writes reviews of role-playing games and comment on gaming culture at https://theanxiousgamer.wordpress.com/. Eleanor is the author of “A Tragedy of Manners,” from our […]

There’s a French term, l’esprit d’escalier (literally “staircase wit”), which refers to the experience of coming up with clever or insightful things to say hours after a conversation. For better or worse, the term perfectly describes many of my own social interactions. Our games this month both consider a similar theme. In “Dead Lake Crossing,” […]

Encounters between the everyday and the unknown are a big part of what makes speculative fiction (and, I would argue, art in general) so effective at pulling us out of ourselves and into the mind of someone else. It’s this tension that gives Poe his eerie cerebral terror and LeGuin’s worlds their endless beauty—and their […]

The nomination period for the 2019 Hugo awards is well underway, and those of us at sub-Q thought it might be helpful if we made a little post about our eligibility as a magazine. So: 1. sub-Q Magazine is eligible for the Best Semiprozine award. (We have a high enough circulation and we pay contributors.) […]

One question we commonly get when we invite people to write things for sub-Q is some variation on: What the heck is Interactive Fiction? And—let’s be real—it’s a pretty good question. Searching Google for “what is interactive fiction” brings up lots of results; people have written whole books on the question. (If you want a […]