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Interzone #286
The March-April issue contains new cutting edge science fiction and fantasy novelettes by James Sallis, Val Nolan, Matt Thompson, and Louis Evans. The 2020 cover artist is Warwick Fraser-Coombe, 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 including Zen Cho interviewed by Juliet E. McKenna, and Maureen Kincaid Speller on Rebecca Roanhorse); Andy Hedgecock's Future Interrupted (comment); Aliya Whiteley's Climbing Stories (comment); guest editorial by Val Nolan.
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First published March 18, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 9, 2020
An average issue with stories that appear to be linked by featuring characters with psychological issues facing various uncertain futures.
- "Cofiwch Aberystwyth" by Val Nolan: a group of video loggers visit the site of a nuclear incident on the Welsh coast in order to fulfil a need for a missing video log in the series. But as the story proceeded, the reason for that video log being missed starts to be revealed and turns the current visit into a more dangerous adventure.
- "Rocket Man" by Louis Evans: in an alternate future when manned missiles are the only way to guide them to their target, a man who is part of a team of pilots forever waiting for the order to launch dreams or experiences alternate futures.
- "Organ of Corti" by Matt Thompson: a secretive expedition into a strange structure created by ants turns into a nightmare journey when the possible purpose of it is slowly revealed when the expedition members struggle to survive the adventure.
- "Carriers" by James Sallis: in an anarchic future, a medic struggles to find medicine to keep his patients alive until the conflict grows too violent and he now has to escape to continue living.
- "Cofiwch Aberystwyth" by Val Nolan: a group of video loggers visit the site of a nuclear incident on the Welsh coast in order to fulfil a need for a missing video log in the series. But as the story proceeded, the reason for that video log being missed starts to be revealed and turns the current visit into a more dangerous adventure.
- "Rocket Man" by Louis Evans: in an alternate future when manned missiles are the only way to guide them to their target, a man who is part of a team of pilots forever waiting for the order to launch dreams or experiences alternate futures.
- "Organ of Corti" by Matt Thompson: a secretive expedition into a strange structure created by ants turns into a nightmare journey when the possible purpose of it is slowly revealed when the expedition members struggle to survive the adventure.
- "Carriers" by James Sallis: in an anarchic future, a medic struggles to find medicine to keep his patients alive until the conflict grows too violent and he now has to escape to continue living.
January 28, 2021
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 9:48 am Edit
COFIWCH ABERYSTWYTH by Val Nolan
“‘Why should we not sing during the war?’ the Prime Minister had asked.”
Peppered with Welsh words as subtitles, this novelette must surely be an alternate world narrative of future apocalypse, other than perhaps the still ringing-true of the PM asking us to sing, as he has done recently during our own unseen covfefe cloud of a Third World War now emerging since this work was written. I say it must be an alternate world narrative because the future people here remember the word ‘Brexit’, a word recently, in my own real-time, soon to become irrelevant or airbrushed out of history. Whistling down the road. What, me? No, not me, guv. Meanwhile, this is an engaging enough story based in a country where my father was born: Wales. And a seaside place with a pier and a university, and here it is compared to Chernobyl — Aberystwyth as a future genius-loci which is nicely built up here. As three female VanderMeer type pioneers, i.e. three vloggers (one of whom is the narrator), aided by drones, arrive at this dangerously ruined place after a mutiny by post-Brexit British militarists in a submarine had caused it to be nuked! I, for one, doubted the reliability of the narrator from the start! But, of course, I may be an unreliable reviewer…
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 10:21 am Edit
ROCKET MAN by Louis Evans
“And yet unbeknownst to all, at the heart of every checklist is a lacuna, an absence. A small silent question, implicit and unanswered. A space for free will.”
Free will here freewheels? That space another airbrushing I mentioned above? This is the story narrated by one of the kamikaze rocket men himself, where Chernobyl above now becomes Hiroshima, or rather Moscow during the Cold War. Today’s cold and coughing war, notwithstanding. This Rocket Man’s glitch of free will is the MISS in mission and missile. MISS in inadvertent mutual synergy with the recurrent act of a FALL in VS Pritchett’s old story I recently read here. And I wonder, based on his subsequent dreams and trucking, whether this narrator is as unreliable as the previous one above!
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 12:43 pm Edit
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS)
From the internet: “The organ of Corti is the sensitive element in the inner ear and can be thought of as the body’s microphone. It is situated on the basilar membrane in one of the three compartments of the Cochlea. It contains four rows of hair cells which protrude from its surface.”
ORGAN OF CORTI by Matt Thompson
“The desert seemed almost habitable after Madrid.”
“If the nest was a listening organ, did it not make sense that there would also be eyes, and fingertips, and lungs?”
Not that unseen enemy of today’s Madrid, a pervasion I mentioned earlier above, but a story of the Corti-Cochlea and of a seeming sand tsunami into the city, and this more reliable narrator, I guess, who, after being abandoned by his ‘wife’, takes us, or is taken by, five well-characterised other pioneers into the desert surrounding the city, towards a series of artfully limned towers, a seeming termitory or nest, down into which they explore, with guiding tablet, a journey as Clark Ashton Smith might have described today with a leaner text than his earlier exotic curlicues — an attritional tour-de-force of a narrative that is like Xenakis music transfigured into the meaning of words in a story, smoothed out with linear melodies that are recognisable as an audit trail of fiction as felt truth. Vestigial, fissured organ, the narrator Elias with now unreliable companions that become nightmarish incantatory refrains of tinnitus in whisper and word, a sound system of parasites within parasites (see my paragraph on viral dolls within dolls here in the just completed Black Static review) the SURVIval of now pionEARS, I guess. Starting off as a comforting, womb-like place, the characters now encounter seeming fabricated ants, snakes, Gila Monsters, jerboas, random timeswitches, a hall of mirrors, abandoned annexes, loops of lostness beyond LOST itself, phonemes, glossolalia, stereocilia, acoustic configurations — and with a constructive absurdism the lost companions singly or multiply resonate as irritants to the those remaining, their voices as intrinsic part of the linear Xenakis music as well as its now non-linear aspects, its rises and dying falls, as heard in this sonic morass of a nest or whatever it is. Today, in the real-time news, the Real Madrid was far more frightening, I guess. Here at least two of the characters can manage to make love. Do we now believe in the “Smart systems filtered into elixirs of life” … and when do my long-term efforts in ‘mutual synergy’ finally become this story’s “mutual repulsion”?
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 2:19 pm Edit
CARRIERS by James Sallis
I found this novelette a bit laboured and confusing as a plot, but there are many wonderful passages with provocative thoughts about life and its expectations — with eventually one’s self as the Ghost beyond its own myth’s ending. Yet somehow, as history teacher, one’s self is writing this out for astonished posterity.
Featuring street kids growing up amid the brutal social results of virus, and doctors battling for the lives of others, and rag tag armies, curfews, military coups ….
Assuming it was written before the current situation in our own real-time started, it is as remarkable, in at least this one respect, as the Reichard story reviewed yesterday here, by adding to it a striking picture of how we might extrapolate how our current predicament will evolve…. “Broken bones, beatings, malnutrition, the latest strain of virus trying for a foothold. Treat and street. With ever diminishing funds, insufficient staff and makeshift supplies,… […] It’s a curious sort of infection and, years later, I was part of the defense, one cell among antibodies flooding in to challenge it, little suspecting that I myself hosted a similar infection. […] Somehow you’ve become a frontier doctor,…”
…or that virus within a virus mentioned about the previous work above. Mushrooms with gills, notwithstanding.
“I do my best to stay away from news, but sometimes it finds you anyway.”
COFIWCH ABERYSTWYTH by Val Nolan
“‘Why should we not sing during the war?’ the Prime Minister had asked.”
Peppered with Welsh words as subtitles, this novelette must surely be an alternate world narrative of future apocalypse, other than perhaps the still ringing-true of the PM asking us to sing, as he has done recently during our own unseen covfefe cloud of a Third World War now emerging since this work was written. I say it must be an alternate world narrative because the future people here remember the word ‘Brexit’, a word recently, in my own real-time, soon to become irrelevant or airbrushed out of history. Whistling down the road. What, me? No, not me, guv. Meanwhile, this is an engaging enough story based in a country where my father was born: Wales. And a seaside place with a pier and a university, and here it is compared to Chernobyl — Aberystwyth as a future genius-loci which is nicely built up here. As three female VanderMeer type pioneers, i.e. three vloggers (one of whom is the narrator), aided by drones, arrive at this dangerously ruined place after a mutiny by post-Brexit British militarists in a submarine had caused it to be nuked! I, for one, doubted the reliability of the narrator from the start! But, of course, I may be an unreliable reviewer…
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 10:21 am Edit
ROCKET MAN by Louis Evans
“And yet unbeknownst to all, at the heart of every checklist is a lacuna, an absence. A small silent question, implicit and unanswered. A space for free will.”
Free will here freewheels? That space another airbrushing I mentioned above? This is the story narrated by one of the kamikaze rocket men himself, where Chernobyl above now becomes Hiroshima, or rather Moscow during the Cold War. Today’s cold and coughing war, notwithstanding. This Rocket Man’s glitch of free will is the MISS in mission and missile. MISS in inadvertent mutual synergy with the recurrent act of a FALL in VS Pritchett’s old story I recently read here. And I wonder, based on his subsequent dreams and trucking, whether this narrator is as unreliable as the previous one above!
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 12:43 pm Edit
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS)
From the internet: “The organ of Corti is the sensitive element in the inner ear and can be thought of as the body’s microphone. It is situated on the basilar membrane in one of the three compartments of the Cochlea. It contains four rows of hair cells which protrude from its surface.”
ORGAN OF CORTI by Matt Thompson
“The desert seemed almost habitable after Madrid.”
“If the nest was a listening organ, did it not make sense that there would also be eyes, and fingertips, and lungs?”
Not that unseen enemy of today’s Madrid, a pervasion I mentioned earlier above, but a story of the Corti-Cochlea and of a seeming sand tsunami into the city, and this more reliable narrator, I guess, who, after being abandoned by his ‘wife’, takes us, or is taken by, five well-characterised other pioneers into the desert surrounding the city, towards a series of artfully limned towers, a seeming termitory or nest, down into which they explore, with guiding tablet, a journey as Clark Ashton Smith might have described today with a leaner text than his earlier exotic curlicues — an attritional tour-de-force of a narrative that is like Xenakis music transfigured into the meaning of words in a story, smoothed out with linear melodies that are recognisable as an audit trail of fiction as felt truth. Vestigial, fissured organ, the narrator Elias with now unreliable companions that become nightmarish incantatory refrains of tinnitus in whisper and word, a sound system of parasites within parasites (see my paragraph on viral dolls within dolls here in the just completed Black Static review) the SURVIval of now pionEARS, I guess. Starting off as a comforting, womb-like place, the characters now encounter seeming fabricated ants, snakes, Gila Monsters, jerboas, random timeswitches, a hall of mirrors, abandoned annexes, loops of lostness beyond LOST itself, phonemes, glossolalia, stereocilia, acoustic configurations — and with a constructive absurdism the lost companions singly or multiply resonate as irritants to the those remaining, their voices as intrinsic part of the linear Xenakis music as well as its now non-linear aspects, its rises and dying falls, as heard in this sonic morass of a nest or whatever it is. Today, in the real-time news, the Real Madrid was far more frightening, I guess. Here at least two of the characters can manage to make love. Do we now believe in the “Smart systems filtered into elixirs of life” … and when do my long-term efforts in ‘mutual synergy’ finally become this story’s “mutual repulsion”?
nullimmortalis March 23, 2020 at 2:19 pm Edit
CARRIERS by James Sallis
I found this novelette a bit laboured and confusing as a plot, but there are many wonderful passages with provocative thoughts about life and its expectations — with eventually one’s self as the Ghost beyond its own myth’s ending. Yet somehow, as history teacher, one’s self is writing this out for astonished posterity.
Featuring street kids growing up amid the brutal social results of virus, and doctors battling for the lives of others, and rag tag armies, curfews, military coups ….
Assuming it was written before the current situation in our own real-time started, it is as remarkable, in at least this one respect, as the Reichard story reviewed yesterday here, by adding to it a striking picture of how we might extrapolate how our current predicament will evolve…. “Broken bones, beatings, malnutrition, the latest strain of virus trying for a foothold. Treat and street. With ever diminishing funds, insufficient staff and makeshift supplies,… […] It’s a curious sort of infection and, years later, I was part of the defense, one cell among antibodies flooding in to challenge it, little suspecting that I myself hosted a similar infection. […] Somehow you’ve become a frontier doctor,…”
…or that virus within a virus mentioned about the previous work above. Mushrooms with gills, notwithstanding.
“I do my best to stay away from news, but sometimes it finds you anyway.”
July 27, 2020
Val Nolan takes the Editorial and outlines how in his day job at Aberystwyth University he uses SF and Fantasy to help his students explore the genres’ pedagogical possibilities and delights. In Future Interrupted Andy Hedgecock ponders the creative impulse and suggests humans do this sort of thing because simply living isn’t enough. Aliya Whiteley’s Climbing Stories addresses the utility and pleasure of discovering the “Easter egg” (what’s wrong with the word ‘allusion’ by the way?) hidden in a film or piece of fiction. Book Zone starts with my reviews of Re-Coil by J T Nicholas (whose flaws and unexamined assumptions I point out) and Myke Cole’s Sixteenth Watcha which attempts to humanise military SF but to my mind falls short. Juliet E McKenna recommends The True Queen, Zen Cho’s not quite sequel to Sorcerer to the Crown, which succeeds splendidly on its own merits, and praises the brave writing choices. She also interviewsb the author. Val Nolan considers that Alastair Reynolds’s Bone Silence not only concludes the story arcs of the previous two books in his Revenger trilogy but enhances them, Stephen Theaker finds the anthology New Horizons: The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction edited by Tarun K Saint entertaining and stimulating and Sea Change by Nancy Kress a tense and enjoyable SF thriller. Duncan Lawiec says Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer stirs the subconscious, raising questions without asking them directly, making concrete the many worlds theory; but is also much more. Maureen Kincaid Speller worries that Rebecca Roanhorse’s use of Navajo myths and beliefs in the books Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts violates that culture’s well-documented protectiveness towards its heritage and, despite the fact they were fun to read, sees little except that background beyond the usual urban fantasy clichés.
As to the fiction:
In Cofiwich Aberystwyth1 by Val Nolan each segment has a Welsh language heading. Our narrator, Mila, is exploring for his vlog an Aberystwyth nuked some years before by crazed Brexiter Royal Navy mutineeers who were enraged that the Welsh Senedd was seeking independence from the UK. He has his own demons to contend with though.
Rocket Man by Louis Evans is the story of a US rocket pilot in a universe where navigational guidance systems are not reliable so interballistic missiles require humans to steer them. Every night he dreams of Moscow but by day he resolves that his mission is to miss. In time he finds his attitude is shared by his fellow US rocket men (and by those in the USSR.) A certain admiration is called for when an author takes the old injunction against stating ‘it was all a dream’ and turns it into a strength.
Organ of Corti2 by Matt Thompson follows a group of scientists through the deserts south of Madrid to investigate a series of huge towers resembling termitaries. The labyrinth they enter resembles the organ of Corti in the human ear and turns out to have been built by deliberately genetically modified ants, now gone rogue.
Carriers3 by James Sallis is a post-apocalypse story, the usual tale of mayhem and casual inhumanity leavened slightly by one of its characters being a medic.
As to the fiction:
In Cofiwich Aberystwyth1 by Val Nolan each segment has a Welsh language heading. Our narrator, Mila, is exploring for his vlog an Aberystwyth nuked some years before by crazed Brexiter Royal Navy mutineeers who were enraged that the Welsh Senedd was seeking independence from the UK. He has his own demons to contend with though.
Rocket Man by Louis Evans is the story of a US rocket pilot in a universe where navigational guidance systems are not reliable so interballistic missiles require humans to steer them. Every night he dreams of Moscow but by day he resolves that his mission is to miss. In time he finds his attitude is shared by his fellow US rocket men (and by those in the USSR.) A certain admiration is called for when an author takes the old injunction against stating ‘it was all a dream’ and turns it into a strength.
Organ of Corti2 by Matt Thompson follows a group of scientists through the deserts south of Madrid to investigate a series of huge towers resembling termitaries. The labyrinth they enter resembles the organ of Corti in the human ear and turns out to have been built by deliberately genetically modified ants, now gone rogue.
Carriers3 by James Sallis is a post-apocalypse story, the usual tale of mayhem and casual inhumanity leavened slightly by one of its characters being a medic.
April 10, 2020
If not for Carriers by James Sallis, it would be a good issue.
April 16, 2020
Great read as always. Of particular note Val Nolan and Matt Thompson’s stories.
August 30, 2022
Honestly, probably the worst issue of Interzone I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews