Loop Garou 6: Special Pandemic Issue

Three months in the vacuum.

One spent moving and acclimating to la rentrée in a new city. One spent on vacation in my hometown. One spent caring for sick family and falling ill myself. All the while, I was collaborating on a new project:

Loop Garou 6: Special Pandemic Issue.

Download the Loop Garou 6 EPUB & PDF here

Loop Garou is an SF e-zine of art, fiction and nonfiction, edited by myself and Raja Thiagarajan (find him on twitter @raja99).

Loop Garou 6 (LG6) contains eight flash SF stories, art by Lee Sargent, Alek Slominski, and Benjamin Specklin, music from Vance Reese, a discussion on plagues and pandemics in Star Trek: The Original Series, an essay by Gregory Rawlins, correspondence, reviews, and various other nonfiction contributions from members of the Bloomington Science Fiction Discussion Group (SFDG) and their friends and family.

Resurrection of Loop Garou

Loop Garou was a dead SF zine. Raja, the “Guest Editor” of the Loop Garou Special Cyberpunk Issue (1989), searched for acolytes and sacrifices (read: editors and submissions) to reanimate the zine.

I answered the call.

The source of the zine’s pun title originates from the defunct Indiana University Science Fiction Loop (the Loyal Opposition to the IU Science Fiction Group), a former SF group in Bloomington, Indiana. In the 1990s, this group was supplanted by the Bloomington SFDG, which I joined in January 2012. I attended the weekly meetings for eight months before moving back to France, and have kept in touch through the mailing list and visits home.

The creation of Loop Garou 6 (LG6) was largely motivated—and eventually inspired—by the past 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the months of remote work, SFDG meetings moved to Zoom and two issues of Loop Garou surfaced in the SFDG mailing list—issues painstakingly cut, crafted and concocted from the deadtree remains within Raja’s vault of mysteries and memories. Following the group’s interest in the reprinted e-zines and their contemporary perspectives on the cyberpunk literary movement, we decided a Special Issue on the pandemic would likely most interest future readers (especially our future selves).

Master and Acolyte brought this beast to life. The monster is rough around the edges, and best read in EPUB format (though PDF is available). Download Loop Garou 6 here in either EPUB or PDF format to read and enjoy:

https://pannis.info/SFDG/LoopGarou/

Certain submissions from LG6 will be reworked or reprinted on my blog in the weeks to come. Keep an eye out for more from the Loop Garou team.

-ChrisAir