Issue 1 special thanks

Dear Readers,

My name is Tory Hoke, and I’m a writer, illustrator, programmer, and recent convert to interactive fiction. As I’ve explained in Storycade, sub-Q Magazine was founded this summer, with the help of Devi Acharya, as the first professional publication for interactive fiction. As they say, go hard or go home.

Now we’re a week away from launching the first story, and already I’m in a lot of debt.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Chris Klimas for founding and spearheading Twine—the software that showed me what was possible—and sharing with me where it’s been and where it’s going.

I owe Leon Arnott and Thomas Michael Edwards for developing extraordinary tools to tell stories.

I owe Porpentine for being willing to work with me—an unknown, unproven quantity—and to help me shape sub-Q‘s creative contract, for which there was nearly no precedent.

And I owe Vajra Chandrasekera for the long and extremely entertaining email conversation that proved a top-flight author of traditional fiction can be persuaded to write for IF… and to create one of the most bizarre, beautiful, and profound works—in any medium—I’ve ever experienced.

And last but not at all least, I owe the newsletter subscribers, who had ear to the ground enough to hear of us, and curiosity enough to wonder what we were about, and courage enough to trust us with their bandwidth. I asked them to come out and play, and they brought their ball. They proved there was an audience for what we were doing. They turned hope into reality.

In the coming months, I hope to repay those debts and more.

Thank you for reading sub-Q. It’s a great time to be alive in IF. We’re so glad to have you, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store.

See you around,

Tory Hoke
Editor-in-Chief, sub-Q Magazine