Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Read online

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  TTA Press

  www.ttapress.com

  Copyright ©

  First published in 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  INTERZONE

  SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

  ISSUE 211

  JUL-AUG 2007

  Cover Art

  Lunar Flare

  By Richard Marchand

  richardmarchand.com

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  ISSN 0264-3596: Published bimonthly by TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK (t: 01353 777931) Copyright: © 2007 Interzone and its contributors Distribution: UK: Warners (t: 01778 392417): Central Books (t: 020 8986 4854): WWMD (t: 0121 7883112): USA/Canada: Ubiquity (t: 718-875-5491): Disticor (t: 905-619-6565): Australia: Gordon & Gotch (t: 02 9972 8800): If any shop doesn't stock Interzone please ask them to order it, or buy it from one of several online mail order distributors ... or subscribe!

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  Editors: Andrew Hedgecock, Liz Williams, Jetse de Vries, David Mathew, Andy Cox ([email protected]) Book Reviews Editor: Sandy Auden (and Paul Raven) Proofreader: Peter Tennant Advertising & Publicity: Roy Gray ([email protected]) Typefondler: Andy Cox E-IZ: Pete Bullock Website & Forum: ttapress.com Subscriptions: The number on your mailing label refers to the last issue of your subscription. If it is due for renewal you will see a reminder on the centre pages pullout. Please renew promptly!

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  CONTENTS

  INTERFACE (EDITORIAL, NEWS)

  CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF INTERZONE—Various Contributors

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

  INTERMISSION (STORIES)

  EXVISIBLE—Carlos Hernandez

  Illustrator: Warwick Fraser-Coombe

  DEER FLIGHT—Aliette De Bodard

  Illustrator: Stefan Olsen (epilogue.net—gallery)

  ELEVATOR EPISODES—Ahmed A. Khan

  KNOWLEDGE—Grace Dugan

  Illustrator: David Gentry (sixshards.co.uk)

  INTERLOCUTIONS (REVIEWS)

  MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of the Latest Films

  LASER FODDER @ 500 RPM—Tony Lee's New Regular Review of DVD Releases

  SCORES—John Clute's Regular Review of the Latest Books

  RICHARD MORGAN—Talks About Black Man with Andrew Hedgecock

  BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed

  MANGAZONE—Sarah Ash's Regular Review of Manga

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK (SPECIAL)

  GUEST EDITORIAL—March of the Whiteshirts

  STARING DOWN THE WITCHES—Interview by Andrew Hedgecock

  LOVERS—Peake Memoir Extract

  LONDON, MY LIFE!—Novel Extract

  THE AFFAIR OF THE BASSIN LES HIVERS—Short Story

  CONTENTS

  CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF INTERZONE—Various Contributors

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

  GUEST EDITORIAL—March of the Whiteshirts by Michael Moorcock

  STARING DOWN THE WITCHES—Interview by Andrew Hedgecock

  LOVERS—A Memoir of Mervyn & Maeve Peake by Michael Moorcock

  THE AFFAIR OF THE BASSIN LES HIVERS—Short Story by Michael Moorcock

  EXVISIBLE—Carlos Hernandez

  DEER FLIGHT—Aliette de Bodard

  ELEVATOR EPISODES IN SEVEN GENRES—Ahmed A. Khan

  KNOWLEDGE—Grace Dugan

  MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of the Latest Films

  LASER FODDER @ 500 RPM—Tony Lee's New Regular Review of DVD Releases

  SCORES—John Clute's Regular Review of the Latest Books

  RICHARD MORGAN—Talks About Black Man with Andrew Hedgecock

  BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed

  MANGAZONE—Sarah Ash's Regular Review of Manga

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  CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF INTERZONE—Various Contributors

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  JOHN PICACIO

  Whatever age-defying cream Interzone smears on her face every morning, we should all be so lucky to have some. Not just age-defying, but age-defining in many cases. How many well-intentioned mags squeak out 25 or so noble issues, only to fold? Too many to count. How many can say that they're not only still going strong at 25 years (!) and 200-plus issues, but are as vital and relevant as ever?? Yeah, think about that. It's more than momentarily impressive. It's something to celebrate and cherish. I was fortunate to be featured and profiled in issue 204 of ‘Britain's Longest Running Science Fiction Magazine'. It was a proud moment for me, not just to be associated with the magazine, but to be associated with the editors. So to you, and all of the hard-working editors, writers, reviewers, and artists that have shaped this collective dream that David Pringle started, I raise my glass. Thanks for 25 years of breaking down the walls and continuing to grow and adapt in times that, more than ever, demand it. Here's to your next 25 years of literary and graphic revolution.

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  JASON STODDARD

  Since I'm a relatively new ‘stalwart', to use Gardner Dozois's word, I can't claim any long history with Interzone. Although I was certainly aware of the publication in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I was (a) too inexperienced to write well enough to be in the mag and (b) too busy to write anything for it.

  What got my attention was the first of the ‘new’ Interzones, issue 194. “Holy crap!” I thought. “This is like Science Fiction Age, back from the grave! Neat cover, good art, a format that immediately says ‘credible magazine-kinda-deal’ to anyone who sees it!” When I saw that Interzone accepted longer work, I ran out and got some IRCs and sent out ‘Winning Mars'. The rest ... well, you know the rest.

  When I first received Andy's request for an electronic copy of ‘Winning Mars', my wife and I were staying in a B&B outside of Conwy, Wales. I was browsing email on my Treo, and saw Andy's name and the ttapress.com address. The fact that this was Interzone didn't immediately click, so I fired off a quick response saying, “Cool, thanks, but I'm on vacation, can I send it to you when I'm back in the States?” The next morning it clicked, and I spent several hours hand-wringing (as authors do) about saying, hey, Andy, I'm in the UK right now, I can have someone go to my house and get my computer and send a copy, can I buy you a pint, blah blah, what an idiot I am. But eventually, I went home, sent the electronic copy, and—there you go.

  My wife and I entertain quite a bit, and we usually have an array of science fiction magazines out on the coffee-tables. It's entertaining to see our guests pick up a typical US ‘pulp’ magazine, leaf through it, frown, put it down, and say something like, “Wow, I didn't know they did stuff like this anymore.” On encountering Interzone, they open it up, sit back, and read it like the latest issue of Town and Country.

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  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  I can't pretend to have been in on Interzone from the very start, although the commencement of its long and lustrous ‘career’ coincided almost exactly with the beginnings of my own uncertain and wan one. In 1982, when Interzone was born, I had just quit my day job and buckled down to writing, striving to become the freelance author I had always imagined myself
to be in utero. Three years would pass before my first professional sales occurred.

  Somewhere in that desert of striving, I was browsing the racks of New York City's Forbidden Planet, the branch opposite the Strand Bookstore, then a rich resource of actual books and comics, rather than the toys and videogames that eventually came to fill its shelves. On a spinner rack, marked down to twenty-five or fifty cents, was an early issue of Interzone. Always eager for new markets, I snatched it up. I cannot now lay my hands on the zine, numbered about issue 30 or so, but I recall its cover rather well: a canary yellow background with an ink illustration, rather Beardsleayn, I seem to remember. Plainly, this was not your typical SF zine. Reading its canny contents, rich with ‘radical hard SF’ promise, confirmed my first impression.

  Armed with an address, I began to submit stories. And before too long, editor David Pringle proved daft enough to buy some. He was followed in this lunacy by the new editors. Blame them.

  I have always experienced a keen excitement upon seeing a story of mine in Interzone. It always feels, to an American, like getting published in an alternate continuum, where fantastical literature matters in a different way than in the USA. I'm breathing the same air as Wells and Peake. And that's a heady atmosphere indeed!

  Long may Interzone run!

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  ERIC BROWN

  It's 21 years since David Pringle bought what was to be my very first published short story, ‘Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal Zen Equation'. It was a big day for me: I'd been writing for years and getting nowhere, and affirmation like an acceptance from a magazine of the stature of Interzone was exactly what I needed to keep me writing. Interzone had been going for a few years then, and it's still going strong now—a testament to the hard work of its editors. It's hard to overestimate the importance of the magazine in fostering new talent: most writers who go on to write novels cut their literary teeth on the short form, and these days there are precious few outlets for the short story. Let's hope Interzone can keep on for another two decades, and more.

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  GWYNETH JONES

  Ah, Interzone! My formative memories are of the magazine in the mid-80s, when defining what is meant by ‘hard radical sf’ seemed vitally important. Does hard mean difficult? Does radical mean roots or cutting edge? Does it have to have rocketships? SF writers in those new romantic days had the audacity to care about current affairs, any kind of current affairs, not just the news pages in New Scientist, and Interzone ran extraordinary stories of immodest ambition like Michael Blumlein's ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case For Report', (#12 1984), an amazingly vicious assault about vivisecting Ronald Reagan, in gruesome medical detail; Geoff Ryman's ‘The Unconquered Country'(#7); Lee Montgomerie's ‘War And/Or Peace’ (#11), a phantasmagoria sort of based on the Greenham Common Protest. And I wish I could remember the title or the author of the hilarious one about Deconstructionist CIA agents in the White House ... they may have been FBI ... Maybe someone can help me?

  My first ever published science fiction story, ‘Gravegoods', was published by Interzone in 1989, in the ‘Special Space Story’ issue. I lost sight of the IZ a bit after that, though two Aleutian stories were published in the ‘90s, and a Polish ghost story called ‘Grazing The Long Acre'; which makes quite a chunk of my whole output. But my real brush with Interzone fame came relatively recently with a novel extract, ‘The Saltbox’ (2001), which David Pringle was running for me in return for secret services to the magazine. A complaint from an outraged reader lead to copies of the issue being confiscated by the Brighton police, suspected of being paedophile porn. First I heard of it was a page on my message service (I was on holiday in California) saying, call David Pringle urgently! I was pretty excited, you may well imagine, but alas, nothing came of it. I never got my day in court.

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  JAMIE BARRAS

  One cold winter's evening about ten years ago, the wiring in the building in which I was living at the time burnt out, setting fire to a storeroom full of paint in the process. As my flat was on the fifth floor, and the storeroom was at the bottom of the building's only staircase, all that I could do was light a few candles, open a bottle of wine and wait to see who or what would reach me first: the fire brigade or the fire. While I was waiting, I read Mary A. Turzillo's ‘Eat or Be Eaten: A Love Story’ (Interzone 104), and I was ... transported, drawn into the story, away from what was going on out in the real world. There can't be many magazines that can truthfully claim to publish fiction so good that its readers cease to notice that buildings are burning down around them. Happy 25th Anniversary, Interzone. May there be many more.

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  PETER F. HAMILTON

  Longest (and award winning!) story I sold to Interzone was ‘The Suspect Genome', which came in at around 24,000 words. Horribly dated now as anyone who watches CSI will tell you. However, David Pringle was pleased with it, even thought it was far longer than he normally published. So given my unjust reputation for slightly bigger-than-average books, he gleefully told me: now you'll find out what proper editing is like. When the manuscript came back, he'd managed to cut it by 300 words. I was intolerably smug for a week.

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  IAN R. MACLEOD

  For me, Interzone will always mean David Pringle. After many years of working on ‘the novel’ and then ‘the next novel', the latter of which I never finished, and neither of which sold, I found myself writing short fiction in the late 1980s. I wasn't a regular buyer of SF magazines, and had never attended an SF convention, but, as a frequenter of Roy Peyton's Andromeda Bookstore in Birmingham, I was a reader of Interzone—sometimes quietly in the shop during my long Civil Service lunch hours, although I did occasionally fork out my money. Now that I had some short stuff of my own to try out, it seemed the obvious place to try. I remember getting the sort of ‘nice’ rejection slips which are so encouraging when you're starting out writing, and become so annoying later on. Some of these were from this guy called Pringle. At the time, as I recall, Interzone was still a sort of collective. But Pringle seemed to be the main man, and I was flattered. All the more so when he bought what turned out to be my first published short story, and then quite a few after that. Eventually, I got to know David and his famous briefcase, in which he always had some new story, and to appreciate his quiet presence and patient faith and hope in what he was doing. I owe him a debt which I'm proud and happy to record here.

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  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Interzone gave me my first break, in buying my first professionally published story ('The Xeelee Flower’ in 1987) and it stayed around to buy another, and another, with a few rejections along the way. It was exactly the platform that I and the rest of the ‘Interzone generation’ needed to get started, and to get noticed. I always liked the fact that Interzone was an initiative that came out of fandom; it's one clear instance of fandom hugely enriching the professional field.

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  More to come! If you would like to contribute to this feature please post your entry to the editorial address or email it to [email protected]

  Copyright © 2007

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

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  Clarke Award. The trophy bookend and 2007 pound cheque went to M. John Harrison for Nova Swing.

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  As Others See Us

  Ruth Franklin reviews Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union: ‘Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ (Slate, May)

  Christopher Hitchens knows our darkest secret: ‘The great drawback of sci-fi is the dearth of sex from which it compels itself to suffer (I realized when reading Leader's book that this is why I have never bothered with the genre)...’ (reviewing Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis in The Atlanti
c Monthly, May)

  Germaine Greer refutes John Lauritsen's theory of Frankenstein—that a great novel couldn't possibly have been written by self-educated Mary Shelley, so Percy Bysshe must be the real author—by ingeniously arguing that it's such a lousy book that Mary obviously did write it. (Guardian, April) Such are the intricacies of feminist litcrit.

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  Nebula Awards

  Oddly, all these ‘2006’ winners appeared in 2005. Novel: Jack McDevitt, Seeker. Novella: James Patrick Kelly, Burn. Novelette: Peter S. Beagle, ‘Two Hearts’ (F&SF 10/05). Short: Elizabeth Hand, ‘Echo’ (ibid). Script: Howl's Moving Castle. Andre Norton (YA): Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness.

  Ray Bradbury amazed us all by explaining that ‘Fahrenheit 451 is not ... a story about government censorship.’ (LA Weekly, May)

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  As Others See Us II

  Why Antony ‘Angel of the North’ Gormley shouldn't be taken seriously: ‘Well, look at the words I've been using, Vaporise, star-burst, humanoid, space station, beaming down. And look at those figures waiting on rooftops—it's like an opening shot from Doctor Who. What is the language this sculpture speaks? Isn't it obvious? Sci-fi. [ ... ] Serious artists need not feel threatened by it, any more than serious film-makers need feel threatened by an android blockbuster.’ (Tom Lubbock, Independent, May)

  Trivia Masterclass. On the 30th anniversary Star Wars celebration in LA: ‘Those in touch with their dark sides rushed exhibits of tortured druids on a rack, Luke Skywalker's severed head and the Princess Leia slave costume...’ (Time, May) A correspondent explains: ‘These are not the druids you're looking for.'

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  More Awards

  Compton Crook/Stephen Tall for first novel: Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon * Edgars (mystery): Matthew Graham's script for the first instalment of Life on Mars won Best TV Episode Teleplay * Philip K. Dick: Chris Moriarty, Spin Control * Pilgrim for sf criticism: Algis Budrys * Pulitzer for fiction: Cormac McCarthy, The Road.