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Interzone #274
Interzone #274 (March-April 2018): New Science Fiction & Fantasy
The March–April issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by James Sallis, Antony Johnston, Julie C. Day, Alexandra Renwick, T.R. Napper, Michael Reid, and Eliot Fintushel. The cover artist for 2018 is Vince Haig (on the theme of abductees), and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, plus an interview with Sam J. Miller); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and a guest editorial by Antony Johnston.
Cover Abductees 1 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig
Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway by James Sallis
Soul Music by Antony Johnston
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coomber
Schrödinger's by Julie C. Day
illustrated by Richard Wagner
Never the Twain by Michael Reid
illustrated by Richard Wagner
Opium for Ezra by T.R. Napper
illustrated by Martin Hanford
baleen, baleen by Alexandra Renwick
Zen by Eliot Fintushel
Guest Editorial
Antony Johnston
Future Infinite Diversity in Repressive Combinations
Jonathan McCalmont
Time The Gernsback Conundrum
Nina Allan
Ansible News, obituaries
David Langford
Book Zone
Books reviewed include Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (plus interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller), Mad Hatters and March Hares edited by Ellen Datlow, Science A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst, The Queen of All Crows by Rod Duncan, Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell, Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift, Dark State by Charles Stross, Blood Binds the Pack by Alex Wells, The Smoke by Simon Ings, Improbable Botany edited by Gary Dalkin
Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe
Films reviewed include The Shape of Water, Black Panther, Coco, Maze The Death Cure, Attraction, Jupiter's Moon, Downsizing
Cover Abductees 1 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig
Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway by James Sallis
Soul Music by Antony Johnston
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coomber
Schrödinger's by Julie C. Day
illustrated by Richard Wagner
Never the Twain by Michael Reid
illustrated by Richard Wagner
Opium for Ezra by T.R. Napper
illustrated by Martin Hanford
baleen, baleen by Alexandra Renwick
Zen by Eliot Fintushel
Guest Editorial
Antony Johnston
Future Infinite Diversity in Repressive Combinations
Jonathan McCalmont
Time The Gernsback Conundrum
Nina Allan
Ansible News, obituaries
David Langford
Book Zone
Books reviewed include Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (plus interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller), Mad Hatters and March Hares edited by Ellen Datlow, Science A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst, The Queen of All Crows by Rod Duncan, Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell, Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift, Dark State by Charles Stross, Blood Binds the Pack by Alex Wells, The Smoke by Simon Ings, Improbable Botany edited by Gary Dalkin
Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe
Films reviewed include The Shape of Water, Black Panther, Coco, Maze The Death Cure, Attraction, Jupiter's Moon, Downsizing
- GenresScience Fiction
231 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 14, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 12, 2018
There are seven new short stories in the new Interzone, all in the fair-to-good range, but no real fire starters. Two of them stood out for me:
“Schrodinger’s” by Julie C. Day has the craftiest premise – two strippers and a physicist open a strip club that puts the titular scientist’s famous theorem into practice. The imagery, especially detailing what goes on inside the club’s “quantum refrigerator”, is prismatic and multifarious, and the two dancers-turned-entrepreneurs have a sweet and affecting relationship. The story ends up trailing off in a direction that didn’t thrill me, but it’s still a solid story with a lot of fun stuff going on.
Hjordis is a teenage girl living in the year 2681, who is also a teenage boy named Saif, dying of pancreatic cancer in 2018, in Michael Reid’s “Never the Twain”. Since the cure for cancer doesn’t arrive until 2203, Hjordis/Saif can’t save his 2018 self without screwing up the timeline. A great SF premise, with a very affecting rendering of the dual experience of its main character(s), especially when Saif’s condition worsens and Hjordis has to experience the disease ravaging his body like a waking nightmare.
There are also the usual columns, two of which make some very bold and potentially controversial assertions about contemporary SF:
Jonathan McCalmont states that this is his last turn writing Future Interrupted, and it’s a doozy: the author blasts what he calls reactionary narratives masquerading as progressive celebrations of diversity. His applies his argument mainly to the new “Star Trek: Discovery”, but also calls out authors John Scalzi, Ann Leckie, and Yoon Ha Lee for reveling in stories of violence and domination instead of relating the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed. Not the kind of thing fans (including myself) want to hear, but food for thought nonetheless.
This issue’s Time Pieces by Nina Allan imagines what science fiction might have been like without Hugo Gernsback, the Amazing Stories publisher who essentially invented the genre as we know it today. She suggests that Gernsback, and the SF fandom he fostered into being, turned speculative fiction into an insular, self-reverential genre that refused to engage with mainstream literary fiction, hence depriving the world of SF literature that could be discussed in conjunction with it.
“Schrodinger’s” by Julie C. Day has the craftiest premise – two strippers and a physicist open a strip club that puts the titular scientist’s famous theorem into practice. The imagery, especially detailing what goes on inside the club’s “quantum refrigerator”, is prismatic and multifarious, and the two dancers-turned-entrepreneurs have a sweet and affecting relationship. The story ends up trailing off in a direction that didn’t thrill me, but it’s still a solid story with a lot of fun stuff going on.
Hjordis is a teenage girl living in the year 2681, who is also a teenage boy named Saif, dying of pancreatic cancer in 2018, in Michael Reid’s “Never the Twain”. Since the cure for cancer doesn’t arrive until 2203, Hjordis/Saif can’t save his 2018 self without screwing up the timeline. A great SF premise, with a very affecting rendering of the dual experience of its main character(s), especially when Saif’s condition worsens and Hjordis has to experience the disease ravaging his body like a waking nightmare.
There are also the usual columns, two of which make some very bold and potentially controversial assertions about contemporary SF:
Jonathan McCalmont states that this is his last turn writing Future Interrupted, and it’s a doozy: the author blasts what he calls reactionary narratives masquerading as progressive celebrations of diversity. His applies his argument mainly to the new “Star Trek: Discovery”, but also calls out authors John Scalzi, Ann Leckie, and Yoon Ha Lee for reveling in stories of violence and domination instead of relating the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed. Not the kind of thing fans (including myself) want to hear, but food for thought nonetheless.
This issue’s Time Pieces by Nina Allan imagines what science fiction might have been like without Hugo Gernsback, the Amazing Stories publisher who essentially invented the genre as we know it today. She suggests that Gernsback, and the SF fandom he fostered into being, turned speculative fiction into an insular, self-reverential genre that refused to engage with mainstream literary fiction, hence depriving the world of SF literature that could be discussed in conjunction with it.
March 20, 2018
An average issue, with interesting stories by Antony Johnston, Michael Reid and Alexandra Renwick.
- "Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway" by James Sallis: a couple take a ride in a car with a driver in this future where other cars have a difference
- "Soul Music" by Antony Johnston: on an colony world isolated when their wormhole collapsed, an artist is offered a guitar by her ex-abusive boyfriend. Little does she know the contents of the guitar would become the centrepiece of her next artistic show in the colony that is trying to live day-by-day while waiting for the wormhole to be re-established (if ever).
- "Schrödinger's" by Julie C. Day: set in California in a future where an unrest is gradually creeping closer to town, a group of girls finance the operations of a scientists who provides them with a quantum device that makes their exotic dance operations a draw: in its field, the audience sees other quantum possibilities of the dancers, some of them very strange. But it all comes to an end when the fighting reaches the city: unless one girl operates the quantum device in another way, hoping to influence the fighting instead.
- "Never the Twain" by Michael Reid: a story of one person living two lives: in the present as a patient dying from cancer and in the future as an inhabitant of a far away colony. Should the two lives be kept separate, especially when the future half has knowledge that could save the present half?
- "Opium for Ezra" by T.R. Napper: a story about a group of people isolated in a self-powered tank on a battlefield. As they pursue their enemy, they receive a strange set of messages aimed at the commander, telling her she's not a commander of a tank, but actually immersed in a video game. And they desperately want her to leave the game by opening the hatch, which would let the enemy in. Which reality should she believe in?
- "baleen, baleen" by Alexandra Renwick: an interesting fantasy tale of a man who deliberately drowns himself multiple times. In doing so, his non-physical self gains access to whale-like 'baleen strings' that he can manipulate to change the past. But doing so would also change his future.
- "Zen" by Eliot Fintushel: aliens take over minds of the crew of an Earth ship, except for one whose meditations prevent them from doing so. But will her meditations be strong enough to prevent them from invading the Earth?
- "Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway" by James Sallis: a couple take a ride in a car with a driver in this future where other cars have a difference
- "Soul Music" by Antony Johnston: on an colony world isolated when their wormhole collapsed, an artist is offered a guitar by her ex-abusive boyfriend. Little does she know the contents of the guitar would become the centrepiece of her next artistic show in the colony that is trying to live day-by-day while waiting for the wormhole to be re-established (if ever).
- "Schrödinger's" by Julie C. Day: set in California in a future where an unrest is gradually creeping closer to town, a group of girls finance the operations of a scientists who provides them with a quantum device that makes their exotic dance operations a draw: in its field, the audience sees other quantum possibilities of the dancers, some of them very strange. But it all comes to an end when the fighting reaches the city: unless one girl operates the quantum device in another way, hoping to influence the fighting instead.
- "Never the Twain" by Michael Reid: a story of one person living two lives: in the present as a patient dying from cancer and in the future as an inhabitant of a far away colony. Should the two lives be kept separate, especially when the future half has knowledge that could save the present half?
- "Opium for Ezra" by T.R. Napper: a story about a group of people isolated in a self-powered tank on a battlefield. As they pursue their enemy, they receive a strange set of messages aimed at the commander, telling her she's not a commander of a tank, but actually immersed in a video game. And they desperately want her to leave the game by opening the hatch, which would let the enemy in. Which reality should she believe in?
- "baleen, baleen" by Alexandra Renwick: an interesting fantasy tale of a man who deliberately drowns himself multiple times. In doing so, his non-physical self gains access to whale-like 'baleen strings' that he can manipulate to change the past. But doing so would also change his future.
- "Zen" by Eliot Fintushel: aliens take over minds of the crew of an Earth ship, except for one whose meditations prevent them from doing so. But will her meditations be strong enough to prevent them from invading the Earth?
Read
April 6, 2018Antony Johnston’s guest editorial considers influences. We all have them but everybody’s are different. In what he tells us will be his last column for Interzone Jonathan McCalmont lauds the spread of short stories exploring the experiences of the oppressed and marginalized but bemoans the fact that this has not travelled over into the genre’s main novel publishing outlets. In Time Pieces Nina Allan argues that the influence of Hugo Gernsback was to the detriment of both the genre and the mainstream, though that influence might now have run its course. In the Book Zone I review E J Swift’s Paris Adrift, Andy Hedgecock the Lewis Carroll inspired anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, Maureen Kincaid Speller considers Sam J Miller’s Blackfish City and interviews the author, Science Fiction: A Literary History is admired by John Howard, Rod Duncan’s The Queen of All Crows gets a thumbs up from Ian Hunter, Gareth L Powell’s Embers of War is given a guarded welcome by Duncan Lunan, Lawrence Osborn notes the cliff-hanger ending to Charles Stross’s Dark State (but it is the second in a trilogy,) Stephen Theaker loved Blood Binds the Pack by Alex Wells even if it lacked originality, The Smoke by Simon Ings gets the approval of Ian Sales and Elaine Gallgher reviews Gary Dalkin’s plant based anthology Improbable Botany.
In the fiction:-
Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway by James Sallis is a very short piece bulked out by graphics redolent of rear light trails and features an illicit jaunt with a human driver on roads governed by automation.
Antony Johnston’s Soul Music is set on a far-flung environment once connected to human civilisation by an Einstein-Rosen bridge now broken. The plot concerns gold-coloured local manifestations known as souls.
Schrödinger’s by Julie C Day tells of the eponymous strip club (“A Universe of possibilities”) run by women in which a Dr Ringenbach has installed a box wherein molecular isolation is enabled by quantum refrigeration. But what can be kept in can also be kept out.
Saif and Hjørdis are two conjoined personalities - light years and centuries apart - in Never the Twain by Michael Reid.
T R Napper’s Opium for Ezra is set inside a virtually impregnable battle tank engaged in a war against the Chinese. Or is it the experiences of someone immersed in a highly addictive virtual game? Whatever, it revels overmuch in the battle details.
baleen, baleen by Alexandra Renwick is the story of Zeke, who keeps diving into the ocean to drown and “pierce the curtain”, with his friends there to haul him back out. But every time he resurfaces the world has changed.
In Zen by Eliot Fintushel an alien invasion of the solar system is being enabled by koans.
In the fiction:-
Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway by James Sallis is a very short piece bulked out by graphics redolent of rear light trails and features an illicit jaunt with a human driver on roads governed by automation.
Antony Johnston’s Soul Music is set on a far-flung environment once connected to human civilisation by an Einstein-Rosen bridge now broken. The plot concerns gold-coloured local manifestations known as souls.
Schrödinger’s by Julie C Day tells of the eponymous strip club (“A Universe of possibilities”) run by women in which a Dr Ringenbach has installed a box wherein molecular isolation is enabled by quantum refrigeration. But what can be kept in can also be kept out.
Saif and Hjørdis are two conjoined personalities - light years and centuries apart - in Never the Twain by Michael Reid.
T R Napper’s Opium for Ezra is set inside a virtually impregnable battle tank engaged in a war against the Chinese. Or is it the experiences of someone immersed in a highly addictive virtual game? Whatever, it revels overmuch in the battle details.
baleen, baleen by Alexandra Renwick is the story of Zeke, who keeps diving into the ocean to drown and “pierce the curtain”, with his friends there to haul him back out. But every time he resurfaces the world has changed.
In Zen by Eliot Fintushel an alien invasion of the solar system is being enabled by koans.
January 27, 2021
Whether stereotypes, caricatures, “obedient characters” or real people, the reader is not you but Ezra, and this story is its own drug transcending the 19th century opium of any steampunk travesty.
“The fusion reactor wound up, making a noise akin to young girls screaming.”
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
“The fusion reactor wound up, making a noise akin to young girls screaming.”
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
February 28, 2020
My favourite story this issue was Michael Reid's Never the Twain. A beautiful sad, sad story about living two lives, and about dying in one of them. My glasses got a little bit misty.
"I lie there, listening to the sobbing, feeling like a monster because I can't stop dying."
"I lie there, listening to the sobbing, feeling like a monster because I can't stop dying."
May 5, 2018
A strong issue, however, my personal favourite stories were 'Opium for Ezra' by T.R. Napper and 'Never the Twain' by Michael Reid.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews