Category: News

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 […]

I wanted to talk a bit about a singular and peculiar pre-Twine, choice-based game that came out in 2006 called Age of Fable. Even now there’s not anything (that I’ve found!) particularly like it.   The FAQ for the game also points to this indeterminate, fluid history. The text describes the game as an “RPG” but […]

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.) […]

Wow, so. 2019, huh? We have a lot of fun things planned for this year–including the winning entries from our first ever game jam, and two new original pieces to join them in February, a few additional non-fiction columns every month, and the possibility of issue-wide cover art too. But before we get all starry-eyed […]

It’s December, somehow, already, and that means we have another game to set before you! This month on the 18th, we’ll be bringing you “Thanks for the Memories,” an original sci-fi piece from author and game writer Erin Roberts. On the 25th, we’ll feature a guest interview with Erin, where she talks about her process […]

As we announced last month, from November 15 to December 15, we’ll be hosting a game jam open to very short pieces of interactive fiction or sequential art on the theme of love. We’ll also be accepting submissions for interactive fiction proposals through our Submittable portal for authors new to the idea of interactive fiction. The […]

It’s November! We have some exciting things going on this month, not least of which is our second game from author Jac Colvin, whose Russalka game “Lost Ones” we published back in March. This month’s game, “Ocean’s Call,” features a different kind of supernatural water creature, and one that’s just as steeped in mythology as […]

This month’s game on our website, Anna Anthropy’s “Queers in Love at the End of the World,” gives you only 10 seconds per playthrough to make your choices and see what happens. That unusual design choice is part of what gives the game such a forceful, compelling impact—a sense of urgency and hopelessness and hopefulness […]

Up here in the northern hemisphere, October heralds the onset of fall—shorter days, longer nights, a crisp coldness to the air that speaks of the coming of winter. One of the reasons I like fall so much is the reaction that gathering dark pulls out of people. There’s a tendency to gather, to light fires, […]

When I was a kid, there was little I liked more than reading—unless maybe it was computer games. So the first time I saw a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book in my school’s library, I was excited. It was like the best of both worlds! I got to be in control of the characters, just like […]

The innate nature of humanity is a topic that’s as old as thought. In Warring States China, for example, Mengzi held that human nature—while innately good—was corruptible by society, while Xunzi argued that society was the only thing which taught good behaviour in the first place. (Xunzi, ever the optimist, also thought that people had […]

Our July game, the Hidden King by dcsross, presents us with a picture of madness, as the unnamed narrator struggles to navigate the shifting realities of a schizoaffective disorder. Also, there may be werewolves. Here’s our schedule for July: July 10th – Bruno Dias brings us part two of a primer in narrative design for writers.  […]

As an author and avid reader of prose fiction as well as the interactive kind, I often wonder what it is about the two media that makes them so engrossing. For me, at least, one of the key elements of interactive fiction is how it involves the reader in the tale it’s telling. The best […]

Released in 1997, Andrew Plotkin’s “The Space Under the Window” (“Space”) was a groundbreaking, unclassifiable work of interactive fiction, the impact of which is still felt today. Many consider it a work of “poetic” IF, or poetry outright, but what does that mean? Is poetry a quality of language, interaction, or both? The work itself […]

Here at sub-Q, we’re no stranger to authors using technologies in novel ways. We’re also pretty good at trouble-shooting when things go wrong in a submission, or when one doesn’t play nice with a particular web browser. Still, with wearables, embedded RFIDs, and self-driving cars in the news these past few years, it’s sometimes hard for us […]

Perhaps it’s just my upbringing in England and current residence in Oregon, but I’ve always associated Spring with rain. Another thing that’s associated with Spring in some folklore traditions are certain types of fairy. In pre-Roman Spain, for instance, the Cantabrian people believed that on the night of the Spring Equinox, small female fairies called […]