What do you think?
Rate this book
Interzone 260, September-October 2015
The September-October issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by John Shirley, Jeff Noon, Priya Sharma, C.A. Hawksmoor, Christien Gholson. The 2015 cover artist is Martin Hanford, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Dave Senecal, Martin Hanford, Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Features: Where O Where Has My Hugo Gone? by Ian Sales; Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Laser Fodder by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Book Zone (book reviews); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and Shaun Green interviews Becky Chambers.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 13, 2015
42 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 30, 2015
Weedkiller, John Shirley: Um conto impecável do veterano escritor cyberpunk. Num futurismo próximo distópico, elementos considerados improdutivos ou inúteis para a ordem financeira são caçados e eliminados, usando as crises ambientais e económicas para justificar o extermínio dos socialmente indesejáveis. A ironia dos sacrifícios individuais em nome do bem geral é uma clara alusão ao discurso de crise neoliberal.
Blonde, Priya Sharma: Uma bem montada e aterrorizante variante do conto de fadas. Aqui, Rapunzel é uma rapariga mantida numa mansão por uma madrasta fiel, que usa os seus cabelos loiros para enriquecer, vendendo-os a cabeleireiros. Sharma reconta a lenda com toques de contemporaneidade deprimida, revendo a lenda sob perspectivas de vitimização e libertação.
No Rez, Jeff Noon: Por debaixo do fortíssimo experimentalismo linguístico do autor, há uma história de FC pura sobre um futuro improvável em que trocamos a visão do real pelo virtual, onde a afluência se mede em pixels e se murmura que há um mundo para além da resolução, um real mais vívido do que as mais requintadas virtualidades em alta resolução. Uma fabulosa experiência de leitura, para os que sejam capazes de desenvolver empatia com técnicas narrativas experimentais, e com um final memorável, com um personagem a perder os implantes oculares que lhe davam acesso ao mundo virtual e acordar para uma realidade onde tudo, as ruas, os edifícios, as roupas, a sinalética, está coberto pelo azul que permite a sobreposição do virtual sobre o real.
Murder on the Laplacian Express, C.A. Hawksmoor: Por detrás do título a fazer vénias a Agatha Christie está um conto feérico, homenagem aos tempos mais simples do passado da FC. Aqueles tempos onde a ciência ainda não tinha destruído a ilusão que os planetas do sistema solar poderiam ser habitáveis e estariam repletos de vida exótica, quando as histórias de aventuras no espaço traziam o espírito de fantasia das aventuras na selva para os conflitos interplanetários. O conto vale precisamente pela forma descontraída como aborda esta nostalgia pela ficção científica do passado.
The Spin of Stars, Christine Gholson: Um pouco de southern gothic para encerrar a Interzone, num conto que nos transporta aos mistérios que vivem nos pântanos dos Everglades floridianos.
Blonde, Priya Sharma: Uma bem montada e aterrorizante variante do conto de fadas. Aqui, Rapunzel é uma rapariga mantida numa mansão por uma madrasta fiel, que usa os seus cabelos loiros para enriquecer, vendendo-os a cabeleireiros. Sharma reconta a lenda com toques de contemporaneidade deprimida, revendo a lenda sob perspectivas de vitimização e libertação.
No Rez, Jeff Noon: Por debaixo do fortíssimo experimentalismo linguístico do autor, há uma história de FC pura sobre um futuro improvável em que trocamos a visão do real pelo virtual, onde a afluência se mede em pixels e se murmura que há um mundo para além da resolução, um real mais vívido do que as mais requintadas virtualidades em alta resolução. Uma fabulosa experiência de leitura, para os que sejam capazes de desenvolver empatia com técnicas narrativas experimentais, e com um final memorável, com um personagem a perder os implantes oculares que lhe davam acesso ao mundo virtual e acordar para uma realidade onde tudo, as ruas, os edifícios, as roupas, a sinalética, está coberto pelo azul que permite a sobreposição do virtual sobre o real.
Murder on the Laplacian Express, C.A. Hawksmoor: Por detrás do título a fazer vénias a Agatha Christie está um conto feérico, homenagem aos tempos mais simples do passado da FC. Aqueles tempos onde a ciência ainda não tinha destruído a ilusão que os planetas do sistema solar poderiam ser habitáveis e estariam repletos de vida exótica, quando as histórias de aventuras no espaço traziam o espírito de fantasia das aventuras na selva para os conflitos interplanetários. O conto vale precisamente pela forma descontraída como aborda esta nostalgia pela ficção científica do passado.
The Spin of Stars, Christine Gholson: Um pouco de southern gothic para encerrar a Interzone, num conto que nos transporta aos mistérios que vivem nos pântanos dos Everglades floridianos.
January 23, 2021
nullimmortalis September 28, 2015 at 3:10 pm Edit
WEEDKILLER by John Shirley
“…jagged shards spun around her, glinting, reflecting her image over and over,…”
I reckon this cybermedia-mix of reality and virtual reality means you can’t actually use WEEDKILLER itself for finding out what really happens in it – just as much as weedkiller as a killer of weeds, or a winnower of chaff and wheat, cannot be used without killing both chaff and wheat. One character uses virtual reality means for her empathy kicks that take her beyond gaming into a realm where she is what she thinks she is, producing this effect by intake of something that may or may not be weedkiller, so why not the human weedkiller himself – ostensible family man or secret, authorially disintentional hologrammatiser of his own backstory? – becoming someone that even the author believes what the text says he is. It makes this extrapolation of a bleak world – with a need for the culling of unworthy, unproductive humans to prevent them from blighting the required pattern of productivity – EVEN bleaker than it is. But which the cullers, which the culled and which the uncullables?
Charlie Venter his own Charlie Brooker.
“…planted on social media.”
nullimmortalis September 29, 2015 at 4:36 pm Edit
BLONDE by Priya Sharma (& here)
“She defaces the paintings, smashes the porcelain and bends the tines of the pastry forks.”
The tines as if fiction hair made metal?
It seems appropriate that following a story entitled ‘Weedkiller’, too, that this Rapunzel theme and variations where her rapid anagen blondeness becomes baldness is next the story to read. An intriguing treatment of isolation by vicious-sounding myths instilled by others about what her escape into an unknown outside world of men and monsters would mean… Instead such monsters come to her…. And these ‘weeds’ knot like mere hair – or life? – inside her… Read on, I say, and see.
nullimmortalis September 29, 2015 at 6:53 pm Edit
NO REZ by Jeff Noon
“Need to talk to Bella about it, tech geek: strange life she has, in her tiny dark room,”
I often hope my dreamcatching real-time reviews are a form of ‘blue sky thinking’, no more than I hope with this Noon’s height of a POV source of actually living with the pop-ups and textually conjured existence of a (sometime focusing sometime scattering) cyber-self called Aiden, POV upon POV, as he tries to triangulate his bearings during a street mugging situation (as I try to triangulate books with my gestalt reviews from 2008 and as Brian Aldiss did in a completely different way with his 1968 novel ‘Report on Probability A’ that I dreamcaught here).
NO REZ synchronously resonates in mutual symbiosis with the Shirley story above. And its ‘sprites’ or ‘pixels’ chime, in hindsight, with Sharma’s vision of Rapunzel’s strands of hair coming back to her in a different form… A story that is is the ‘Golden Resolution’ of a mind-sky extrapolation from today’s growing sensation of becoming an Internet existence, as well as its classical Golden Mean, in an astonishing graphological word-portrait, through a verse-enjambment, typographically bi-landscape medium.
I see what I see. Skimming, streaming, ‘vision-sick.’
nullimmortalis September 30, 2015 at 1:36 pm Edit
MURDER ON THE LAPLACIAN EXPRESS by C.A. Hawksmoor
“Her headtresses washed over her face as she looked back down the silver ribbon of the express train glinting blue and violet in the sunset.”
I think I am the wrong person to review this SF story. The plot of politics and conspiracies went completely over my head and I became very confused. On the positive side, I appreciated the style of description, the Express train itself on its journey from Jupiter to Mars, the swashbuckling with fanblades, the more spiritual aspect of a character’s exoskeleton, the dance with the pneuma machina, some of the characterisation and their religions or motivations (where I managed to understand them.)
nullimmortalis September 30, 2015 at 4:41 pm Edit
THE SPIN OF STARS by Christien Gholson
Now THIS is my sort of story. It is a wonderful extrapolation, at least in part, of a Steve Rasnic Tem ‘fishing lost out of the way’ nam, afghan, iraq veteran type story, where a lucky quirk in Brian Aldiss’s Probability year of 1968 is this character’s back story, wherefrom a fished-out manatee is an ancient spell-making grandmother of grandmothers and an old man is the old fogey reviewer like me who helps out the hero, helps him reach his story, through – a passion of mine – connections and astrological harmonics. As a pattern of destiny. Several lives of self whence to choose a single one from the Shirley and Noon concatenations of now…
“Real time – when past and future twist around each other;”
“…the connections between all things, and how those connections play a part in healing.”
——–
There is much else in Interzone #260 in addition the above fiction.
This review has been made using my subscription copy.
nullimmortalis October 5, 2015 at 3:16 pm Edit
–> Page 121
“…our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
This text reaches heights that really touch my core regarding the art of fiction, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ as I called them in the subtitle of my book ‘Weirdmonger’ in 2003, and RUSHDie refers here to the ‘story parasite’ and the ‘irruption of the fantastic into the quotidian’…
WEEDKILLER by John Shirley
“…jagged shards spun around her, glinting, reflecting her image over and over,…”
I reckon this cybermedia-mix of reality and virtual reality means you can’t actually use WEEDKILLER itself for finding out what really happens in it – just as much as weedkiller as a killer of weeds, or a winnower of chaff and wheat, cannot be used without killing both chaff and wheat. One character uses virtual reality means for her empathy kicks that take her beyond gaming into a realm where she is what she thinks she is, producing this effect by intake of something that may or may not be weedkiller, so why not the human weedkiller himself – ostensible family man or secret, authorially disintentional hologrammatiser of his own backstory? – becoming someone that even the author believes what the text says he is. It makes this extrapolation of a bleak world – with a need for the culling of unworthy, unproductive humans to prevent them from blighting the required pattern of productivity – EVEN bleaker than it is. But which the cullers, which the culled and which the uncullables?
Charlie Venter his own Charlie Brooker.
“…planted on social media.”
nullimmortalis September 29, 2015 at 4:36 pm Edit
BLONDE by Priya Sharma (& here)
“She defaces the paintings, smashes the porcelain and bends the tines of the pastry forks.”
The tines as if fiction hair made metal?
It seems appropriate that following a story entitled ‘Weedkiller’, too, that this Rapunzel theme and variations where her rapid anagen blondeness becomes baldness is next the story to read. An intriguing treatment of isolation by vicious-sounding myths instilled by others about what her escape into an unknown outside world of men and monsters would mean… Instead such monsters come to her…. And these ‘weeds’ knot like mere hair – or life? – inside her… Read on, I say, and see.
nullimmortalis September 29, 2015 at 6:53 pm Edit
NO REZ by Jeff Noon
“Need to talk to Bella about it, tech geek: strange life she has, in her tiny dark room,”
I often hope my dreamcatching real-time reviews are a form of ‘blue sky thinking’, no more than I hope with this Noon’s height of a POV source of actually living with the pop-ups and textually conjured existence of a (sometime focusing sometime scattering) cyber-self called Aiden, POV upon POV, as he tries to triangulate his bearings during a street mugging situation (as I try to triangulate books with my gestalt reviews from 2008 and as Brian Aldiss did in a completely different way with his 1968 novel ‘Report on Probability A’ that I dreamcaught here).
NO REZ synchronously resonates in mutual symbiosis with the Shirley story above. And its ‘sprites’ or ‘pixels’ chime, in hindsight, with Sharma’s vision of Rapunzel’s strands of hair coming back to her in a different form… A story that is is the ‘Golden Resolution’ of a mind-sky extrapolation from today’s growing sensation of becoming an Internet existence, as well as its classical Golden Mean, in an astonishing graphological word-portrait, through a verse-enjambment, typographically bi-landscape medium.
I see what I see. Skimming, streaming, ‘vision-sick.’
nullimmortalis September 30, 2015 at 1:36 pm Edit
MURDER ON THE LAPLACIAN EXPRESS by C.A. Hawksmoor
“Her headtresses washed over her face as she looked back down the silver ribbon of the express train glinting blue and violet in the sunset.”
I think I am the wrong person to review this SF story. The plot of politics and conspiracies went completely over my head and I became very confused. On the positive side, I appreciated the style of description, the Express train itself on its journey from Jupiter to Mars, the swashbuckling with fanblades, the more spiritual aspect of a character’s exoskeleton, the dance with the pneuma machina, some of the characterisation and their religions or motivations (where I managed to understand them.)
nullimmortalis September 30, 2015 at 4:41 pm Edit
THE SPIN OF STARS by Christien Gholson
Now THIS is my sort of story. It is a wonderful extrapolation, at least in part, of a Steve Rasnic Tem ‘fishing lost out of the way’ nam, afghan, iraq veteran type story, where a lucky quirk in Brian Aldiss’s Probability year of 1968 is this character’s back story, wherefrom a fished-out manatee is an ancient spell-making grandmother of grandmothers and an old man is the old fogey reviewer like me who helps out the hero, helps him reach his story, through – a passion of mine – connections and astrological harmonics. As a pattern of destiny. Several lives of self whence to choose a single one from the Shirley and Noon concatenations of now…
“Real time – when past and future twist around each other;”
“…the connections between all things, and how those connections play a part in healing.”
——–
There is much else in Interzone #260 in addition the above fiction.
This review has been made using my subscription copy.
nullimmortalis October 5, 2015 at 3:16 pm Edit
–> Page 121
“…our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
This text reaches heights that really touch my core regarding the art of fiction, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ as I called them in the subtitle of my book ‘Weirdmonger’ in 2003, and RUSHDie refers here to the ‘story parasite’ and the ‘irruption of the fantastic into the quotidian’…
November 5, 2015
A somewhat average issue with no outstanding stories but some serviceable stories by John Shirley and Priya Sharma although C.A. Hawksmoor's story has some promise.
- "Weedkiller" by John Shirley: a story of the future where resources are limited and people must either be productive or be eliminated; unless a substitute can be found.
- "Blonde" by Priya Sharma: a re-write of the "Rapunzel" story set in a time where her blonde hair is precious. But her desire to see the outside world would cause a crisis.
- "No Rez" by Jeff Noon: in a future when what you can see depends on how much you are willing to pay, a man accidentally discovers a gizmo that lets him see clearly. Written in a pidgin style, this story needs some work to get into.
- "Murder on the Laplacian Express" by C.A. Hawksmoor: a 'church' Priest and his helper are tasked to protect an executive from assassination on her way to Mars for a conference. But during the journey, the helper learns some facts that make her confront the Priest and work change things for the executive and members of a union the executive is working against.
- "The Spin of Stars" by Christien Gholson: a light fantasy tale of a man who is unexpectedly released from the army. While hitch-hiking, he is picked up and then conveyed by a strange visitor who needs his help to move his unusual 'grandmother'.
- "Weedkiller" by John Shirley: a story of the future where resources are limited and people must either be productive or be eliminated; unless a substitute can be found.
- "Blonde" by Priya Sharma: a re-write of the "Rapunzel" story set in a time where her blonde hair is precious. But her desire to see the outside world would cause a crisis.
- "No Rez" by Jeff Noon: in a future when what you can see depends on how much you are willing to pay, a man accidentally discovers a gizmo that lets him see clearly. Written in a pidgin style, this story needs some work to get into.
- "Murder on the Laplacian Express" by C.A. Hawksmoor: a 'church' Priest and his helper are tasked to protect an executive from assassination on her way to Mars for a conference. But during the journey, the helper learns some facts that make her confront the Priest and work change things for the executive and members of a union the executive is working against.
- "The Spin of Stars" by Christien Gholson: a light fantasy tale of a man who is unexpectedly released from the army. While hitch-hiking, he is picked up and then conveyed by a strange visitor who needs his help to move his unusual 'grandmother'.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews