Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Read online

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  TTA Press

  www.ttapress.com

  Copyright ©

  First published in 2008

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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 214

  JAN—FEB 2007

  Cover Art

  Far Horizon

  By Paul Drummond

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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—© 2008 Interzone and its contributors Distribution—UK—Warners (t: 01778 392417)—Central Books (t: 020 8986 4854)—WWMD (t: 0121 7883112)—Australia—Gordon & Gotch (t: 02 9972 8800)—If any shop doesn't stock Interzone please ask them to order it for you, or buy it from one of several online mail order distributors such as BBR, Fantastic Literature ... or better yet subscribe direct with us!

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  Editors—Andrew Hedgecock, Jetse de Vries, David Mathew, Andy Cox, Liz Williams ([email protected]) Book Reviews Editor (magazine and website)—Paul Raven Proofreader—Peter Tennant Advertising and Publicity—Roy Gray ([email protected]) Typesetterer—Andy Cox E-IZ—Pete Bullock Website—ttapress.com Subscriptions—The number on your mailing label refers to the final 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)

  EDITORIAL—Matters Arising

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

  READERS’ POLL—VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

  INTERACTION (ONLINE FORUM)

  Feedback & Discussion—ttapress.com/forum

  INTERMISSION (STORIES)

  FAR HORIZON—Jason Stoddard

  Illustrator: Paul Drummond

  PSEUDO TOKYO—Jennifer Linnaea

  Illustrator: Darren Winter

  THE TRACE OF HIM—Christopher Priest

  THE FACES OF MY FRIENDS—Jennifer Harwood-Smith

  Illustrator: James White Award Winner

  THE SCENT OF THEIR ARRIVAL—Mercurio D. Rivera

  Illustrator: Paul Drummond

  INTERVIEW

  THE FACTS OF THE MATTER—Iain M. Banks Interviewed by Paul Raven

  INTERLOCUTIONS (REVIEWS)

  MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of Film Releases laser fodder—Tony Lee's Regular Review of DVD Releases

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

  BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed

  MANGAZONE—Sarah Ash's Regular Manga Round-up

  CONTENTS

  EDITORIAL—Matters Arising

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

  THE FACTS OF THE MATTER—Iain M. Banks Interviewed by Paul Raven

  FAR HORIZON—Jason Stoddard

  READERS’ POLL—VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

  PSEUDO TOKYO—Jennifer Linnaea

  THE TRACE OF HIM—Christopher Priest

  THE FACES OF MY FRIENDS—Jennifer Harwood-Smith

  THE SCENT OF THEIR ARRIVAL—Mercurio D. Rivera

  MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of Film Releases

  LASER FODDER—Tony Lee's Regular Review of DVD Releases

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

  BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed

  MANGAZONE—Sarah Ash's Regular Manga Round-up

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  EDITORIAL—Matters Arising

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  OVERSEAS

  Naturally we try to get subscription copies to you as quickly as possible, especially if you're overseas. However, we've noticed that the past few issues have taken much longer to arrive than normal, particularly in the USA. Sorry about that—it's the last thing we all need given the current dollar-sterling exchange rate—but please don't blame us, this slump in service is completely down to DHL Global Mail. Copies to North America, for example, are supposed to take ten days from collection to delivery on the service we've been paying for, but they have been taking ... well, considerably longer than that. This isn't the first time we've had problems with DHL, which is why we moved our business to a different firm once before, but a few issues ago that firm was taken over by DHL. At the time of writing we're looking for a more reliable alternative, and we're confident that copies will begin to arrive in good time again when we've found one, very probably with this issue. Either way, please register for the forum (ttapress.com/forum) and let us know when your copy arrived. It's valuable feedback and helps us to maintain or even improve our level of service.

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  VOTE

  On the first page of this issue's insert you'll see a list of all 2007 stories and artworks you can vote for, or against, in this year's poll, along with all the instructions you need to take part. For those of you new to the poll, bear in mind that you can vote against anything you didn't like, according to IZ poll tradition, as these votes will then be subtracted from the story's positive count. It's quite possible that a story might have fewer positive votes than a story placed below it, because that story might have more negative votes. By the way, last year's winner for story ('Longing for Langalana'), Mercurio D. Rivera, doesn't feature in the 2007 list, but has a fantastic new story in this issue.

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  COLOUR

  A few people have asked if colour might be returning to these pages. The answer is yes, it might. Lately, though, things are a little more complicated than they seem, and involve the printing of some parts of Black Static in advance, but with a bit more time we should be able to sort something out.

  Copyright © 2007

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  ANSIBLE LINK—David Langford's News & Gossip

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  The Way We Live Now. Radio Clyde Breakfast Show presenter: ‘What famous detective features in the Agatha Christie novel The Hound of the Baskervilles?’ Contestant: ‘Is it Harry Potter?’ (Private Eye)

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  Michael Chabon was interviewed by Julie Phillips, biographer of James Tiptee Jr, who asked: ‘Do you think you will ever really break into science fiction? Or are you doomed to keep coming back to literature?’ MC: ‘As for science fiction, it is literature, as you very well know, dear lady. The gates between the kingdoms are infinitely wide and always open!’ (Washington Post Book World)

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  J.K. Rowling surprised a Carnegie Hall audience with the news that her Hogwarts headmaster was gay, and once in love with his rival Grindelwald. Fans tried hard not to remember the comment by her character Rita Skeeter about Dumbledore's duel of magic with that rival: ‘After they've read my book, people may be forced to conclude that Grindelwald simply conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and came quietly.’ Later, Rowling approved legal action by Warner Bros against prospective publishers of Steve Vander Ark's on-line Harry Potter Lexicon in book form. (As a cyberspace resource this was much used by JKR herself, who gave it her fan site award.) A New York judge granted a restraining order against RDR Books on 8 November, blockin
g publication until at least February.

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  More Novel Awards

  World Fantasy: Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Sidon.

  International Horror Guild: Conrad Williams, The Unblemished.

  Gaylactic Spectrum (gay/lesbian interest): Hal Duncan, Vellum.

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  Bad Sex. The Literary Review's uncoveted honour went to the late Norman Mailer for tasty oral sex in The Castle in the Forest, where the relevant male organ is ‘soft as a coil of excrement'. Jeanette Winterson had an honourable mention for ‘silicon-lined vaginas’ in an episode of steamy robot rumpy-pumpy from her novel which is most definitely not sf, The Stone Gods.

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  Harlan Ellison is hopping mad, again, thanks to rumours that J.J. Abrams's new Star Trek film (please imagine a spoiler warning here) involves time travel arranged by the Guardian of Forever, as introduced in Ellison's ‘The City on the Edge of Forever'. Ignoring the possibility that this rumour might be false, our man wrathfully and publicly demanded that Abrams and Paramount should ‘pay for the privilege of mining the lode I own.'

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  As Others Judge Us. The sinister evidence against a US teenager convicted of plotting a school massacre included not only printed images of guns ‘from the Internet’ but what police described as a ‘devil worshipping book titled Necronomicon.’ (Boston Globe)

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  Anne McCaffrey knows how to survive conventions: ‘She wears a protective crystal under her shirt, “to absorb the energy; of her fans’ demands."’ (Robin Roberts, Anne McCaffrey: A Life With Dragons)

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  Robert Ronson, author of a children's sf novel called Olympic Mind Games—set at the 2012 London Olympics—was sternly told by the Olympics 2012 committee that he wasn't allowed to use the O-word, nor such protected terms as ‘London 2012’ or even just ‘2012'. What's more, they complained, ‘there is no such thing as Olympic mind games'. Ronson ignored this bluster and seems to have got away with it.

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  George Takei is an asteroid: 7307 Takei, discovered by Japanese astronomers in April 1994 and now at last officially named.

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  Thog's Masterclass

  Eyeballs in the Sky. ‘The porcine little eyes widened just a bit and then settled elastically back to half-mast.’ (Jeff Somers, The Electric Church, 2007) ‘Her eyes ... rolled a little in her sweet face, wildly, as if she had lost all control over their muscles. Her eyes rolled with insane movement and then went backward.’ (Gardner F. Fox, Escape Across the Cosmos, 1964)

  Eternity Isn't What It Used To Be Dept. ‘Even Eternal Wanderings must come to an end.’ (Lavie Tidhar, Hebrew Punk, 2007)

  Dept of Ecodomy. ‘"Yes, ecology!” Merrivale made the word sound as though he wanted it to rhyme with sodomy.’ (Frank Herbert, Hellstrom's Hive, 1972)

  Gutsy Simile Dept. ‘The thought felt like a tapeworm lodged in the gut of his mind.’ (Brian Ruckley, Winterbirth, 2007)

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  R.I.P.

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  Marc Behm (1925-2007), US author of offbeat thrillers and co-scriptwriter of Help! (1965), died on 12 July aged 82. His novel The Ice Maiden (1983) has a vampire as its central character.

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  Sidney Coleman (1937-2007), leading US theoretical physicist once active in sf fandom, died on 18 November aged 70. He co-founded the specialist press Advent: Publishers in the mid-1950s and reviewed books for F&SF in the 1970s.

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  Alan Coren (1938-2007), UK humorous writer, broadcaster and former Punch and Listener editor, died on 18 October aged 69. Several of his squibs played with sf/fantasy tropes: the Orwell pastiche ‘Owing to Circumstances Beyond Our Control 1984 Has Been Unavoidably Detained...’ (1974) made it into an Aldiss/Harrison Year's Best SF anthology.

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  Peter Haining (1940-2007), UK author and editor best known for some 150 anthologies of supernatural, horror, fantasy, sf and crime, died unexpectedly on 19 November. He was 67. He also published many single-author collections and scores of nonfiction titles (eg several volumes about Doctor Who), and ghost-edited anthologies for Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock.

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  Verity Lambert (1935-2007), UK TV/film producer who debuted with the first series of Doctor Who (from 1963), died on 22 November; she was 71. Other genre work included Adam Adamant Lives (1966), Quatermass (1979), Morons from Outer Space (1985) and a 1999 return to Doctor Who. She received the OBE in 2002.

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  Colin Kapp (1929-2007), UK author and electronics worker fondly remembered for quirky puzzle-stories collected as The Unorthodox Engineers (1979), died on 3 August. His sf career begin in 1958 in New Worlds; novels included The Dark Mind (1964; US Transfinite Man), The Patterns of Chaos (1972) and The Wizard of Anharitte (1973). Kapp was guest of honour at the 1980 UK Eastercon, where he famously delivered his speech in a spacesuit.

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  Ira Levin (1929-2007), US novelist whose best known works of horror and sf—Rosemary's Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972) and The Boys from Brazil (1976)—were all filmed, died on 12 November at age 78. A further sf novel is his dystopian This Perfect Day (1970).

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  Norman Mailer (1923-2007), celebrated US novelist who twice won the Pulitzer prize, died on 10 November; he was 84. Much of his later work has various fantastic elements, most strikingly in the ancient-Egyptian posthumous fantasy Ancient Evenings (1983).

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  Jerzy Peterkiewicz (1916-2007), Polish-born novelist, poet and translator who wrote the afterlife fantasy The Quick and the Dead (1961) and the sf Inner Circle (1966), died on 26 October aged 91.

  Copyright © 2007 David Langford

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE FACTS OF THE MATTER—Iain M. Banks Interviewed by Paul Raven

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  February 2008 sees the arrival of a new novel from Iain M. Banks. Not just any Banks novel, mind you, nor even just any Banks science fiction novel. No—the new book, Matter, sees Banks returning his fictional focus to the much-loved Culture universe for the first time in eight years.

  For those unfamiliar with Banks, a potted history may be enlightening. Banks's début novel, The Wasp Factory, was published in 1984 after it had been rejected numerous times and then rescued from the slush-pile. A dark and nasty family drama with the ultimate twist in the tail, The Wasp Factory fiercely divided the critics, many of whom panned it as being grotesque, sensationalist and, in one case, containing “ghoulish frivolity and a good deal of preposterous sadism.” Despite the negative reviews (or possibly because of them) The Wasp Factory was a huge success—Iain Banks had arrived.

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  The Wasp Factory was not science fiction, however. Banks's first novel of the genre, published in 1987 with the iconic ‘M’ inserted into his name, was Consider Phlebas. It was also the first novel that featured the far-future post-human anarchist techno-utopia which called itself the Culture, and is cited as being one of the books that kick-started the ‘space opera renaissance'.

  Including The Wasp Factory, Banks has published twenty-three books. Matter will be the twenty-fourth; the tenth of his science fiction books, and the seventh to deal with the Culture. Was it hard for him to come back to the Culture after a long hiatus?

  "It's all too easy for me to write about the Culture. The problem is trying to find stuff to write about it that I think will keep people interested. I am the original Culture nerd, so I could easily descend into what you might call the train-spotter end of Culture arcana if left entirely to my own devices. Frankly, part of the point of writing non-Culture books now and again is just to prove to myself that I haven't become the literary equivalent of typecast. It's about pride, I suppose. Or self-delusion. You choose."

  Few authors enjoy quite the level of popularity that Banks has accru
ed. A major factor in this, and one that Banks readily admits to, is that he writes the sort of books that he enjoys reading, and that (by extension) other readers will enjoy reading. Relentlessly populist but uncompromisingly well-written to the point of being literary, Banks's novels burgeon with plot complications, vivid characters caught up in tricky situations, and twist endings aplenty. They're page-turners, to deploy a reviewer's cliché.

  The appeal of the Culture novels partakes of the same qualities, partly in homage to the stories and novels Banks grew up reading. But the Culture itself has a rare and possibly unique appeal of its own, in that it is an unashamed utopian vision; Banks set out to portray a space-faring humanoid civilisation that would be the sort of place he'd like to see us end up.

  "Consider Phlebas was meant to be the anti-space-opera, in a way; in that it was meant to have the full panoply of mad nonsensical over-the-top stuff, deploying the infinite special effects budget that one has in written science fiction, and it was meant to be an antidote to some of the American science fiction I had read, which was very triumphalist and quite right-wing ... it always seemed to involve the most important people, perhaps not actually the nobility or kings or whatever, but people in the military or the political apparatus. So I tried to set it at the level of the grunts, if you like—most of the people who go into the tunnels at the end of Consider Phlebas are the grunts, they're not high up in the system.

  "In some ways, the whole point of the Culture novels is the idea that there actually might be a far better society ahead. It's not all doom and gloom, there might actually be a fabulous time ahead, it's not that horrible grey future that a lot of science fiction writers end up talking about—the Culture is profoundly not a dystopia. It's a utopia ... and a militant one at that, it's proud to be a utopia!"

  Indeed, the Culture's citizens want for nothing—the extensive planned economy of the civilisation has created a state of post-scarcity where exploitative labour is unheard of, and the concept of personal property almost forgotten; where no one goes hungry or has to live in cramped squalor (unless they decide to do so for aesthetic reasons); where biological death is obsolete (yet largely accepted as part of life), and the very morphology of the body can be changed almost at a whim; where there is little for the average citizen to do except whatever takes their fancy, up to and including leaving the civilisation entirely should they so choose.