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    Interzone #273 (November-December 2017)
    Interzone #273 (November-December 2017)
    Interzone #273 (November-December 2017)
    Ebook233 pages3 hours

    Interzone #273 (November-December 2017)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The November–December issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by Laura Mauro, Rachael Cupp, Dan Grace, Erica L. Satifka, R. Boyczuk, and 2017 James White Award winner Stewart Horn. The cover artist for 2017 is Dave Senecal, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, and Vincent Sammy. Features: Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and a guest editorial by Erica Satifka.

    Cover art: 417h3r105 v6 by 2017 cover artist Dave Senecal

    Fiction:

    Looking for Laika by Laura Mauro
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    After the Titans by Rachael Cupp
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Fully Automated Nostalgia Capitalism by Dan Grace

    The Big So-So by Erica L. Satifka
    illustrated by Vincent Sammy

    The Garden of Eating by R. Boyczuk
    illustrated by Martin Hanford

    2017 James White Award Winner:
    The Morrigan by Stewart Horn
    The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. The winning story receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in Interzone.

    Features:

    Guest Editorial
    Erica L. Satifka

    Future Interrupted: Genre Culture from Below
    Jonathan McCalmont

    Time Pieces: An Autumn Journey
    Nina Allan

    Ansible Link: News, obituaries
    David Langford

    Reviews:

    Book Zone
    Books reviewed include Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, 2084 edited by George Sandison, Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee, Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan, A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge, Provenance by Ann Leckie, Blue Shift by Jane O’Reilly, The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams: Volume 1, Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng, The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle

    Mutant Popcorn
    Nick Lowe
    Films reviewed include Blade Runner 2049, It, Flatliners, Happy Death Day, mother!, Thor: Ragnarok, The Ritual, Geostorm, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The Lego Ninjago Movie

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateNov 14, 2017
    ISBN9781370455249
    Interzone #273 (November-December 2017)
    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 #273 (November-December 2017) - TTA Press

      interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

      ISSUE #273

      NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2017

      Publisher

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

      w: ttapress.com

      e: [email protected]

      f: TTAPress

      t: @TTApress

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

      Editor

      Andy Cox

      [email protected]

      Story Proofreader

      Peter Tennant

      [email protected]

      Events

      Roy Gray

      [email protected]

      © 2017 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 273 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2017

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      sept_2017_FINAL-contents.tif

      COVER: 417h3r105 v6 by 2017 COVER ARTIST DAVE SENECAL

      senecal.deviantart.com

      INTERFACE

      stir-crazy.tif

      EDITORIAL

      ERICA L. SATIFKA

      no-shortcuts.tif

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      JONATHAN McCALMONT4

      la jetee contents.tif

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      kazuo-ishiguro.tif

      ANSIBLE LINK

      DAVID LANGFORD

      FICTION

      laika (1).tif

      LOOKING FOR LAIKA

      LAURA MAURO

      novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

      [email protected] (email)

      after titans (2).tif

      AFTER THE TITANS

      RACHAEL CUPP

      story illustrated by Richard Wagner

      FULLY AUTOMATED NOSTALGIA CAPITALISM

      DAN GRACE

      story

      interzone_bigsoso2.tif

      THE BIG SO-SO

      ERICA L. SATIFKA

      story illustrated by Vincent Sammy

      karbonk.deviantart.com

      Garden.tif

      THE GARDEN OF EATING

      R. BOYCZUK

      story illustrated by Martin Hanford

      martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

      JAMES WHITE AWARD WINNING STORY

      THE MORRIGAN

      STEWART HORN

      nick-harkaway-two-columns.tif

      NICK HARKAWAY

      reviewed in the Book Zone by Maureen Kincaid Speller

      REVIEWS

      bladerunner2-contents.tif

      MUTANT POPCORN

      NICK LOWE

      films

      gnomon.tif

      BOOK ZONE

      books

      EDITORIAL

      ERICA L. SATIFKA

      A few months ago, I got the shock of my life when I found out I’d been nominated for a British Fantasy Award. As my novel Stay Crazy is in part about not being able to trust the reality around you, it was perhaps rather fitting that I read the announcement thirty seconds before going in for an EEG recording that took the better part of an hour. Wired up to monitors, with my phone within sight but out of reach, I spent the hour agonizing over whether or not I’d actually read the tweet correctly. (I’d also had two hours of sleep before on my doctor’s orders, which didn’t help.) In the end, I’d decided that I’d dreamed up the whole thing, so got to have my mind blown a second time when I finally got back on social media.

      I honestly never expected to be nominated for an award, but as soon as I found out I knew I had to attend Fantasycon and lose in person. I’d never been outside of the country before (except to America’s hat, Canada), so a month of rushed paperwork was necessary. Turns out that they do let socialists have US passports, for now anyway. I won’t bore you with the details of the trip, except to say that it was the best trip ever and was definitely worth twelve hours each way in a plane. And then came the con, where I ended my vacation by winning the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. And after that, well, the rest of the day was kind of a blur. I don’t think I stopped smiling for at least an hour.

      Stay Crazy is a very personal book to me. Well, aren’t all books personal to their authors? But this one even more so than most, as it’s set in a fictionalized version of my hometown, and centers around a former job of mine, stocker at a big-box department store. It’s basically autobiography with world-eating monsters and interdimensional detectives layered on top, and to see a project so close to my heart honored with such an award was mind-blowing…just like the entity in the novel!

      I’m also very excited to be making my second appearance in Interzone this issue, along with four other stories. Much like Stay Crazy, ‘The Big So-So’ mines both neurodivergence and my western Pennsylvania background. (Clearly, I have some stuff to work out.) This story came out very voicey, and is probably the closest I’ve ever come to capturing my own internal monologue. Though the cause of societal collapse in ‘The Big So-So’ is outlandish, the idea of communities rebuilding themselves with small, everyday victories is not. As both climate change and increasing political tension (most of it coming from the US, sorry guys) push us closer to apocalypse, it becomes even more important to keep finding reasons to go on. Though this story was written before the 2016 American election, it seems to have a greater resonance in the post-truth era.

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      JONATHAN McCALMONT

      Genre Culture From Below

      no-shortcuts.tif

      Things in the world of science fiction tend to go rather quiet after the summer. Professionals would doubtless explain this deafening silence in terms of the genre publishing industry’s annual cycle of hype, award, and nomination: Early in the year, nominations open for the annual Hugo awards, prompting professionals to start listing their eligible works and gently reminding their followers to get out the vote. As the year deepens, the requests for nomination grow more strident and people start trying to set up networks of mutual recommendation. ‘Vote for my friends x, y, and z’ they cry…hoping that x, y, and z will reciprocate with their own lists of recommendations thereby turning a single blog or Facebook post into three distinct calls to action.

      Once shortlists start appearing, the tone of the conversation starts to shift. The barrow boys and girls exchange loudhailers for evening wear and begin behaving like crocodile diplomats with nothing but positive things to say about both process and community. Behind fixed smiles built from sharpened teeth they furiously calculate whether trips to attend particular conventions and award ceremonies would pay for themselves in terms of either exposure or networking opportunities. Would an anthology invite pay for a transatlantic flight? Is face time with a managing editor worth the price of an expensive hotel and a week of restaurant dining? Can you afford to lose a fortnight’s productivity to con-crud and emotional decompression? Things start to quieten down once the awards begin to flow, authors divest themselves of evening wear stained with blood and bitter disappointment but before going quiet they remember to thank those people who are likely to be of use to them when the cycle starts again. Congratulations to all our friends, death and dismemberment to those who would dare to stand in our way.

      The reason why public discussion of genre literature tends to drop off towards the end of the year is that the cultural spaces surrounding SFF are now almost entirely shaped by the needs of the publishing industry. Once the Hugo Awards have been handed out the professionals go quiet and few non-professionals feel empowered enough to keep conversations going through the winter months.

      This drive to marginalise non-professional voices is not remotely surprising given the current economic climate as, since the crisis of 2008, Capital has been applying more and more pressure to its holdings and subsidiaries. Having been forced to make do with less money, less time, and less staff, the publishing industry has outsourced a lot of its PR to authors who have responded by applying pressure to the social networks that bind them to genre spaces. Rather than empowering fans to speak their minds and start their own conversations, genre culture now encourages people to be silent lest they be torn to pieces for saying the wrong thing.

      SFF is not the only cultural space facing the question of how to reconcile the interests of fans with those of professionals: At one end of the spectrum, Hollywood and TV accord their fans so little respect and agency that they are expected not only to pay for autographs but also to queue for hours in the hope of maybe glimpsing some visibly hung-over celebrities as they share carefully-vetted anecdotes about how much fun it was to trouser enormous paycheques for appearing in superhero films that degrade the human spirit by their very existence. At the other end of the spectrum, spaces devoted to fan fiction exist independently of official sanction and so dissolve the barriers between consumer and content provider in an egalitarian singularity of empowered love and creativity. Genre culture has never approached the cybernetic luxury queer space communism of fan fiction, nor even the weirdly creator-less spaces born of the fact that people will pay to attend anime conventions despite the fact that relatively few anime creators travel to the West or speak English with enough confidence to appear on convention panels. Genre culture may never have achieved the laid-back egalitarian utopias floated by First Fandom, but that doesn’t mean that things have not become noticeably worse over the past few years.

      Despite people’s best efforts to make it more inclusive, genre culture remains a microcosm of the West and, like other Western cultures, SFF has responded to economic insecurity with a slow concentration of power and agency in the hands of the professional class. This accumulation of power is manifest not only in the question of who pays and who gets paid for participating in genre culture, but also in the question of who gets to speak freely in public and in a way that might have an influence upon the discourse: Ordinary fans are less visible on convention panels, reviewers are expected to be relentlessly positive, and anyone raising awkward questions is viewed as little more than a faceless internet troll. Younger fans who aspire to becoming professional writers may be less sensitive to what has been lost but they are undoubtedly aware of the psychological price associated with making unguarded comments anywhere even remotely close to SFF’s remaining cultural spaces.

      Who benefits from the continued existence of genre culture? It seems clear to me that the institutions and cultural spaces that surround SFF now exist solely for the benefit of an exclusive few. Anti-racism campaigns and inclusivity drives are undoubtedly helping to assemble a professional class that is less white and less male than those developed in the past but what of the people who never get paid, never win awards, and are never missed when they suddenly disappear?

      When we talk about the culture surrounding SFF there is a tendency to use a variety of different words to refer to the same weird assemblage of institutions and social networks. People use terms like ‘scene’, ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘field’ interchangeably because there is no real agreement as to what purpose these spaces are supposed to serve: If SFF is a community then why do we keep treating each other so badly and pay through the nose to meet up with friends on holiday? If SFF is a professional field then why do so many people work for free and spend most of their time socialising? We use these terms interchangeably because the politics of genre institutions are rarely up for discussion.

      Jane McAlevey’s book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age argues that trade unions are not just about pay and conditions but also about ensuring that businesses meet the emotional and psychological needs of their employees. Before the first picket line is drawn, unions fight for the dignity of ordinary people and it is time that the institutions comprising genre culture began to do the same. Rather than a culture that celebrates the haves and only then trickles down to the great unwashed, let us build a genre culture that rises from below, that seeks to empower and celebrate the ordinary people who keep the conversation going. Let us create spaces that nurture not just reviewers, commentators, and community organisers but also musicians, documentarians, social historians, and political organisers. Let us look upon fandom less as an exploitable resource for an ailing industry and more as a means of changing the world.

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      An Autumn Journey

      la jetee.tif

      Shortly after we met, Chris and I had one of those conversations about movies in which you end up listing your favourite science fiction films from one to ten. Such lists mutate and change almost as rapidly as our tastes develop – indeed the main point in compiling such lists might be said to reside in the wry amusement we feel when we happen to stumble across them unexpectedly years later. What kind of time-traveller’s joke is it that enables you to discover that in 1989 your favourite SFF movie of all time was in fact the 1976 King Kong? (I’m going to make this personal disclosure even more embarrassing by admitting that John Guillermin’s take is still my favourite of the Kong films. In my defence, that is probably because I was only ten years old when I first saw it, and such memories linger, but even so.)

      My favourite science fiction movie some twenty years later turned out to be Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Lem’s Solaris. It’s been at the top of my list for some time now, and although most of the films below it get swapped around on a year-by-year basis, Solaris has so far maintained its position. Chris said he didn’t care for Solaris. He has always preferred Antonioni to Tarkovsky, and no doubt there’s something deep and meaningful in such a distinction, but any conversation about that would go on for hours. Time enough for a repeat viewing of Stalker, anyway, time we don’t have here. Chris told me his favourite science fiction film of all time was a short called La Jetée, made in 1962 by the director Chris Marker, a name most commonly associated with the French New Wave, a movement led by film pioneers such as Truffaut, Godard and Rivette and that dominated the new French cinema of the 50s and 60s.

      I’d heard of the New Wave, but I had never heard of Marker, nor yet seen any of his work. Fortunately, a DVD of La Jetée was made available not long afterwards, and I was able to watch and appreciate this 28-minute wonder for myself. Chris had told me some things about the plot and the cinematography in advance of my viewing, and what struck me most forcibly was that although he had seen the film only once, on its UK release, it had made such a deep impression on him that he had remembered it precisely in every detail.

      La Jetée is a film about time travel. It takes place in a future Paris, a Paris that has been devastated by a recent atomic war. Together with other survivors, an unnamed protagonist scratches a living in the miles of catacombs beneath the city streets. As a respite from the horrors of his daily existence, he fixates upon a particular memory from the time before the war, when as a child he happened to see a man gunned down on the jetty at Orly airport. It is not the murdered man that he remembers so much as the face of the woman who was also a witness to the crime, a face he feels he knows from somewhere and will never forget. When the protagonist is offered an opportunity to travel back in time, it is this woman he searches for obsessively, certain that he will eventually find her, certain that in finding her he will learn something of crucial importance about his past.

      What is most striking about Marker’s film is its marvellous economy. Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film Twelve Monkeys, directly inspired by La Jetée, is more than four times as long and, while it is a better-than-average SF action movie, it entirely lacks the emotional power and resonance of Marker’s original. I have not even mentioned yet that La Jetée is a movie composed almost entirely of stills. In common with much of the rest of Marker’s work, it takes the form of a photo-essay, with accompanying voiceover. The experience of seeing it is not unlike the experience of sitting in the dark, around a campfire perhaps, listening to a story being read aloud.

      Many critics will point to La Jetée as the ultimate Cold War movie, a tale of terror told in the shadow of the Bomb, and I would not argue with them. But in telling his story Marker travels still further back in time, stirring echoes of a war already fought, yet whose memory still runs deep within the heart and mind of Europe:

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