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    Interzone #275 (May-June 2018)
    Interzone #275 (May-June 2018)
    Interzone #275 (May-June 2018)
    Ebook222 pages2 hours

    Interzone #275 (May-June 2018)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The May–June issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by Erica L. Satifka, Steven J. Dines, Abi Hynes, Malcolm Devlin, and Leo Vladimirsky. The cover art is by Vince Haig, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, and Dave Senecal. Features: Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews); Andy Hedgecock's first Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and a guest editorial by Steven J. Dines.

    Cover Art: Abductees 2 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

    Fiction:

    The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest by Erica L. Satifka

    Looking for Landau by Steven J. Dines
    illustrated by Martin Hanford

    The Mark by Abi Hynes

    The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct by Malcolm Devlin
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    The Christ Loop by Leo Vladimirsky
    illustrated by Dave Senecal

    Features:

    Guest Editorial
    Steven J. Dines

    Future Interrupted: Grasping the Nettle
    Andy Hedgecock

    Time Pieces: Happy Birthday Dear Victor, Happy Birthday to You
    Nina Allan

    Ansible Link: news, obituaries
    David Langford

    Reviews:

    Book Zone
    Maureen Kincaid Speller, Andy Hedgecock, Duncan Lunan, Jack Deighton, Duncan Lunan, Ian Hunter, Elaine Gallagher, Stephen Theaker, Ian Sales

    Books reviewed include Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures edited By Mike Ashley, Lost Mars: The Golden Age of The Red Planet edited By Mike Ashley, Quietus by Tristan Palmgren, The Oddling Prince by Nancy Springer, Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan, Fifty-One by Chris Barnham, The Great Chain of Unbeing by Andrew Crumey, Dreams of the Technarion by Sean McMullen

    Mutant Popcorn
    Nick Lowe

    Films reviewed include Avengers: Infinity War, Ready Player One, I Kill Giants, Anon, Rampage, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Bigfish and Begonia, Mary and the Witch's Flower, A Wrinkle in Time, Every Day, Wildling, A Quiet Place, Isle of Dogs, The Titan, Native

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9780463514962
    Interzone #275 (May-June 2018)
    Author

    TTA Press

    TTA Press is the publisher of the magazines Interzone (science fiction/fantasy) and Black Static (horror/dark fantasy), the Crimewave anthology series, TTA Novellas, plus the occasional story collection and novel.

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      Book preview

      Interzone #275 (May-June 2018) - TTA Press

      interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

      ISSUE #275

      MAY–JUNE 2018

      Publisher

      TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK

      w: ttapress.com

      e: interzone@ttapress.com

      f: TTAPress

      t: @TTApress

      Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

      Editor

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      Story Proofreader

      Peter Tennant

      Events

      Roy Gray

      roy@ttapress.com

      © 2018 Interzone & contributors

      Submissions

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system (tta.submittable.com/submit) but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

      logo cmyk.tif

      SMASHWORDS REQUESTS THAT WE ADD THE FOLLOWING:

      LICENSE NOTE: THIS EMAGAZINE IS LICENSED FOR YOUR PERSONAL USE/ENJOYMENT ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE RE-SOLD OR GIVEN AWAY TO OTHER PEOPLE. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THIS MAGAZINE WITH OTHERS PLEASE PURCHASE AN ADDITIONAL COPY FOR EACH RECIPIENT. IF YOU POSSESS THIS MAGAZINE AND DID NOT PURCHASE IT, OR IT WAS NOT PURCHASED FOR YOUR USE ONLY, THEN PLEASE GO TO SMASHWORDS.COM AND OBTAIN YOUR OWN COPY. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE HARD WORK OF THE CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORS.

      INTERZONE 275 MAY-JUNE 2018

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      Abductees2-contents.tif

      ABDUCTEES 2 by 2018 COVER ARTIST VINCE HAIG

      www.barquing.com

      INTERFACE

      GUEST EDITORIAL

      STEVEN J. DINES

      rift-small.tif

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      ANDY HEDGECOCK

      frank1-small.tif

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      Peter_Nicholls.tif

      ANSIBLE LINK

      DAVID LANGFORD

      FICTION

      THE FATE OF THE WORLD, REDUCED TO A TEN-SECOND PISSING CONTEST

      ERICA L. SATIFKA

      story

      looking-for-landau.tif

      LOOKING FOR LANDAU

      STEVEN J. DINES

      novelette illustrated by Martin Hanford

      martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

      THE MARK

      ABI HYNES

      story

      purpose of the dodo (2).tif

      THE PURPOSE OF THE DODO IS TO BE EXTINCT

      MALCOLM DEVLIN

      novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

      rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

      christ-loop-bleed.tif

      THE CHRIST LOOP

      LEO VLADIMIRSKY

      story illustrated by Dave Senecal

      senecal.deviantart.com

      REVIEWS

      AWIT-contents-small.tif

      MUTANT POPCORN

      NICK LOWE

      films

      autonomous-contents.tif

      BOOK ZONE

      books

      GUEST EDITORIAL

      STEVEN J. DINES

      My father was a ghost.

      For the first twelve years of my life he haunted our home, seldom seen, never heard. I can count the number of conversations he and I had on the fingers of one hand. Thirty years on, I question even those. When my mother finally divorced him, after years of screaming and weeping into the face of his silence, he moved (quietly) on to his next life. And just like that he was gone.

      But not forgotten.

      From an early age, when I wasn’t with my friends playing football or riding bikes, I escaped into reading fantasy fiction. The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings. I was such a massive Tolkien fan that I even adopted him into my family, referring to him as Uncle Tolky. Don’t judge me. He taught me how to be a man through his words. I was all about grand gestures and acts of heroism in my mouse-like existence at school. I daydreamed of being a hero, of sweeping girls off their feet, treating them like queens, saving them from the orcs (my competitors, although there was never any competition; they invariably won). When I read, though, lying in bed at night, these things seemed like they were within the realms of possibility. In Tolkien’s fantasy, the small people won in the end. For a boy with no self-confidence, his parents lumbering troll-like toward divorce, it not only spoke to me but it said hang on in there, son, it works out in the end.

      You might say I found my father in fiction.

      Fast forward some years… I met a young woman, fell head-over-heels in love, got married in Disney World (no, not my idea, but a prince listens to his princess, right?). We had two beautiful children. Through it all, I continued reading – and now writing – voraciously. Like Tolkien’s trilogy, Stephen King’s divisive The Dark Tower became another influence, particularly its overarching message, paraphrased here: it is not so much about the destination as the journey. Take it from me: these are words to live by.

      Look around. So many are chasing their own version of the tower, blind to their surroundings, neglectful of those with whom they share the journey. It takes something to jolt you out of that selfish way of thinking: an infidelity, a miscarriage, a dance on the clifftop of your own divorce, or even your child falling, just like you, into the cracks. I should have listened to Mr King, it would have saved me a lot of heartache. You might say I forgot the face of my father.

      Now, it may sound insane to some, but I find a lot of answers in fiction, in fantasy, like the stories you are about to read. As a father myself now, I look back at what my father taught me and see only a space where he used to be. More recently, since my own children have arrived, he has come back into my life, a ghost still, haunting the pages of my fiction. He is on every page of ‘The Harder It Gets, The Softer We Sing’ (published in this month’s Black Static), at the core of which is a son’s attempt to connect to the father he never really knew. He is in ‘Looking for Landau’, more subtly, in the form of a decision the protagonist is forced to make. Coincidentally (or not), that story may turn out to be the first steps on my own epic fictional journey, my Lord of the Rings or Dark Tower. Full circle. Like a ring. Or a beam that all things follow…

      My point, if I have one, is this: stories matter, fiction matters, but life matters the most.

      Make them all a part of your journey.

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      ANDY HEDGECOCK

      Grasping the Nettle

      rift.tif

      Over the last four years I’ve developed a ritual to mark the arrival of Interzone on my doormat. I liberate it from its shrink-wrap, then immediately read Jonathan McCalmont’s Future Interrupted and Nina Allan’s Time Pieces – columns about sf’s untold stories, submerged traditions, toxic habits and potential to change the world.

      So I was sorry to hear Jonathan had decided to make the twenty-first Future Interrupted his final one; and I was excited, but daunted, when Andy Cox asked me to take over the column.

      In his first piece, in September 2014, Jonathan asked us to delve below the surface of sf, to set aside the customary techniques and shared fascination with the weird, and to identify what is of value, to decide what is worthy of our time. His most recent columns warned against complacency within the institutions of sf: let’s celebrate the success of women and BAME writers, he argued, but let’s not settle for an sf community in which discourse is dominated by a privileged elite, however diverse it may be in terms of identity. And he reminded us how much needs to be done to support the creation of challenging and ambitious work underpinned by a personal vision.

      These ‘structural issues’ are important. The odds are stacked against writers without financial support – class still matters in the arts. And it’s easier for a story that recycles familiar tropes, themes and attitudes to find its way to a mass audience than genuinely original and visionary work that challenges the shared assumptions of late period corporate capitalism.

      Does this matter? There’s a widely held view that if books changed anything the authorities would close every library and branch of Waterstones. It’s hard to find irrefutable evidence for the power of fiction, but there are a few compelling examples of books influencing public discourse. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle highlighted the exploitation of migrant workers and led to legislation on food hygiene. Some historians believe Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists played a part in Labour landslide in the 1945 election. The fact that terminology and ideas from 1984 and Brave New World are part of our language suggests those books influenced public understanding of the abuse of state power and the manipulation of behaviour through technology. And frequent citation in discussions of imperialism and civil rights suggests Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had a major impact in pushing those themes up the political agenda.

      If fiction can influence public opinion, is it appropriate for storytellers to evangelise for particular ideas? Or should they simply turn out stories that amuse or entertain?

      According to the late Ursula K. Le Guin, the answer is ‘no’ and ‘no’. When I interviewed her for The Third Alternative in 2006 she said: I am an artist, not a philosopher, political scientist or pundit. I write stories, not articles or treatises. I don’t give a damn about speculation. I don’t give a damn if [a story] ‘entertains’ anyone. They can go to Walt Disney if they want to be entertained.

      An odd statement from a writer who conducted rigorous thought experiments on feminism (in The Left Hand of Darkness) and anarchism (in The Dispossessed) but one I almost came to accept when I recently reviewed Gordon Van Gelder’s disappointing collection, Welcome to Dystopia. The anthology contains interesting and provocative stories that explore environmental collapse, forced labour and the brutal treatment of migrants, but several contributors manufactured soft targets, and gave them a self-indulgent kicking. The worst offenders are Jay Russell’s ‘Statues of Limitations’, a tedious and silly shaggy dog story about political correctness, and Lisa Mason’s ‘Dangerous’, a story of bureaucracy run amok in which the state demands a woman registers her vagina. This kind of ‘satirical’ fiction confirms prejudices manufactured by the corporate media rather than challenging them. Right wing newspaper columnists such as Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn play a similar game.

      It’s hardly surprising that sf writers are churning out dystopian stories. We live in threatening times, an age in which we are seeing a resurgence of the foreign policy sabre-rattling of the 1980s, the persecution of migrants of the 1970s and employment practices not seen since the 1930s. The insanities we live with should be grist to the creative mill, but cosy critiques of the clunky language of well-meaning people isn’t entertaining, informative or provocative.

      After reading a chain of poorly concocted dystopian tales this winter, I came to the conclusion that even Jerome K. Jerome’s sentimental allegory The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1907) has more to say about the alienation, vulnerability and selfishness of our society than contemporary sf stories that sidestep authentic and specific human experience.

      Fortunately, there are exceptions. Nina Allan’s multilayered and deliciously ambiguous The Rift is literary sf at its best, a tale crammed with wonder, philosophical speculation and the serious reflection on issues of violence, power and control in the world we all inhabit. Allan takes a very different position on the possibilities of sf to that adopted by Ursula Le Guin: If I can speak to one person sufficiently to change their outlook, or to fire their ambition, or to comfort them when they feel alone – either during my own lifetime or beyond – then I’ll have done my job.

      Similarly, Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence is notable not merely for its bravura melding of sf and thriller, but its ambition in highlighting the very real upheavals – economic, environmental, social and political – that are beginning to impinge on the lives of everyone in contemporary Europe.

      The recent Fever Dream by Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin is published as a mainstream literary novel, but collides elements of ghost story, conspiracy thriller and ecological jeremiad to create a complex and unsettling tale of corporate greed and exploitation.

      ‘Mercury’, a short story by Priya Sharma, featured in Ellen Datlow’s recent Mad Hatters and March Hares anthology, has also done much to restore my faith in the possibilities of weird fiction. Sharma blends historical pastiche, fantasy and gritty realism to spin a tale that examines the nexus of madness and imagination, but also asks difficult questions about the human tolerance for dangerous and exploitative employment. It’s a dark and compelling tribute to Lewis Carroll, and a story about the economic power relationships we are all so reluctant to challenge: it is as relevant to the twenty-first century as it is to the nineteenth. Most importantly, it demonstrates that sf can simultaneously entertain, speculate, inform and provoke.

      And, taking a completely different direction, there’s the work of Ken MacLeod, who takes the traditional sf shtick of using the distant future to examine the science and society of the present while, at the same time, reflecting on the ethics of military conflict, AI and governance. But what really separates MacLeod from the herd of deep space thriller writers is his willingness to focus on individual experience of corporate power. His people, AIs and aliens are realised with specificity and wit.

      In this column I will continue Jonathan McCalmont’s search for sf that is of value and worthy of our time. Stories shouldn’t be political treatises, but they must provoke some sort of reflection on our world. And fiction in any genre ought to reflect the joys, horrors, achievements and vicissitudes of the era and culture within which it is written. As I’m writing this, Theresa May is colluding in the US bombing of Syria, appeasing a blustering and unstable bully, while disregarding the opinion of parliament and the British people. Millions of jobs, and sources of income, are on the verge of replacement by robots and semi-intelligent systems. The far right is on the rise across Europe, democracy is under threat and there’s violence in the air.

      We need sf that grasps the nettle of these developments, not stories that offer false comfort by replicating struggles already won, or by creating spurious outrages for characters to rail against. Any fiction worth its salt must acknowledge that our present and future are far from reassuring.

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      Happy Birthday Dear Victor, Happy Birthday To You

      frank1.tif

      I’m sure everyone has particular memories of when they first encountered Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s landmark work, which celebrates its two hundredth anniversary of publication this year, is of such iconic status that whether those memories pertain to the book, one of its many screen incarnations, or the often misnamed monster seems not to matter. My own first memories of Frankenstein are suitably weird, and all the more treasured for that. I’d be willing to wager there aren’t many people out there for whom the immortal tale of an over-ambitious medical student and his misbegotten creation is indelibly linked with images of…ABBA.

      It was April 6th 1974 and I was seven years old. My mum and dad were hosting a Eurovision Song Contest party (yes, and it’s even more sobering to remember that such parties were totally unironic back then) and my brother Peter and I had been banished upstairs to our parents’ bedroom to watch TV. We didn’t mind. We had super-sized bags of Twiglets and de facto permission to stay up as long as we could keep awake and watch anything we wanted. I think we started out following the contest but my brother, even then an inveterate channel-hopper, quickly became bored and began scouting around for something more exciting.

      What we stumbled into – and remained mesmerised by for the next two-and-something hours – was what must have been one of the first broadcasts of Jack Smight’s 1973 made-for-TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story. Frankensteinophiles will be familiar with it, of course, but among the wider viewing public it seems markedly less known. Starring James Mason as Polidori, Leonard Whiting as Victor, David McCallum as the diffident yet steadfast Henry, and Jane Seymour brilliantly cast as both Agatha and the bride, the film even features a cameo from a young Tom Baker as the doom-laden sea captain. The screenplay – by Christopher Isherwood, no less – takes considerable liberties with Shelley’s original text, yet seems to me, still, to remain true to the novel’s pathos and core themes in ways that many other screen adaptations never even attempted.

      Frankenstein: The True Story contains stunning scenes of terror and wonder – the acid bath, the fiery destruction of the laboratory, Jane Seymour’s ‘heads up’ scene most memorably – that most would judge far too frightening to be seen by children under ten. Make no mistake, had my mother the slightest idea of what we were watching, it would have been switched off immediately. Yet the fact that we did get away

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