Interzone #269 (March-April 2017)

By TTA Press

The March–April issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, Sean McMullen, Tim Akers, Christien Gholson, and Richard E. Gropp. The cover artist for 2017 is Dave Senecal, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner and Martin Hanford. Features: Guest Editorial by Steve Rasnic Tem; Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, including an interview with Steve Rasnic Tem conducted by Peter Tennant); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment).

Cover Art:

417h3r105 v2 by Dave Senecal

Fiction:

The Influence Machine by Sean McMullen
illustrated by Richard Wagner

A Death in the Wayward Drift by Tim Akers
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Still Life With Falling Man by Richard E. Gropp
illustrated by Richard Wagner

A Strange Kind of Beauty by Christien Gholson
illustrated by Martin Hanford

The Common Sea by Steve Rasnic Tem

Features:

Guest Editorial by Steve Rasnic Tem

Future Interrupted: #Resistance
Jonathan McCalmont

Time Pieces: The Voyage Home
Nina Allan

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews & Interviews:

Book Zone
Books reviewed include Ubo by Steve Rasnic (plus an interview with the author conducted by Peter Tennant); Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel by Jospeh Fink & Jeffrey Cranor; Bethany by Adam Roberts; The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories edited by Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin; The Promise of the Child and The Weight of the World by Tom Toner; The Mountains of Parnassus by Czesław Miłosz; Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař; The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi; Empire Games by Charles Stross

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe
Films reviewed include The Lego Batman Movie, A Monster Calls, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Assassin's Creed, The White King, The Great Wall, Monster Trucks, Split, A Cure for Wellness, Passengers, The Space Between Us, Collateral Beauty, Underworld: Blood Wars

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370432660

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.

Book preview

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ISSUE #269

MARCH-APRIL 2017

Publisher

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

w: ttapress.com

e: [e-mail]

f: TTAPress

t: @TTApress

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

Editor

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

Events

Roy Gray

[e-mail]

© 2017 Interzone & contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

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INTERZONE 269 MARCH-APRIL 2017

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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417h3r105 v2 by 2017 COVER ARTIST DAVE SENECAL

senecal.deviantart.com

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STEVE RASNIC TEM

interviewed by Peter Tennant

INTERFACE

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GUEST EDITORIAL: WHAT DO WE NOTICE? WHAT DO WE VALUE?

STEVE RASNIC TEM

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

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THE INFLUENCE MACHINE

SEAN McMULLEN

illustrated by Richard Wagner

[e-mail] (email)

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A DEATH IN THE WAYWARD DRIFT

TIM AKERS

illustrated by Richard Wagner

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STILL LIFE WITH FALLING MAN

RICHARD E. GROPP

illustrated by Richard Wagner

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A STRANGE KIND OF BEAUTY

CHRISTIEN GHOLSON

illustrated by Martin Hanford

martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

THE COMMON SEA

STEVE RASNIC TEM

REVIEWS

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BOOK ZONE

books

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MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films

GUEST EDITORIAL

WHAT DO WE NOTICE? WHAT DO WE VALUE?

STEVE RASNIC TEM

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In Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, a writing handbook co-written with my late wife Melanie (and appearing soon from Apex books), I write about how I look for mirrors in the landscape of a story to reflect, amplify, or complicate the theme and expose what the protagonist is feeling or doing. Sometimes what a character notices in his or her environment tells us almost everything we need to know.

The same is true of real life of course. What do we notice? What do we value? I’ve always believed that what writers are doing, whether they intend to or not, is providing a kind of testament as to what it was like, what were our concerns, during our limited time on the planet. I suspect we may be judged both on what we noticed, and what we ignored.

In Peter’s interview he asks me about the appeal of an apocalyptic/dystopian backdrop. I talk some about my new novel Ubo, and how it is a confrontation with one of my biggest fears – our capacity for violence. I suppose it was inevitable that a world ravaged by climate change and environmental degradation – my other greatest fear – would become the backdrop for this meditation on violence. It’s something I think about every day. I have six precious grandchildren. I worry about the kind of world we are leaving them.

The New Yorker has, quite aptly, referred to Jeff VanderMeer as the weird Thoreau. Jeff challenges writers to do a better job at imagining climate change, in essence, to notice what is happening all around us. Jeff is one reason my story ‘A Common Sea’ in this issue exists. Another reason is my friend Diane in the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. When I asked her for a list of things the average person can do to help with the environment and climate change this is what she told me:

1. Drive less. 2. Walk, bike, use public transit, carpool, work near your home. 3. Flying is extremely carbon intensive. Minimize it. 4. Consume fewer things. Things take carbon to manufacture. 5. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. 6. Allow a company to put a solar roof on your home and buy your electricity from them. You will save $$ on your bill. 7. Buy a hybrid or electric vehicle. Or don’t own one. 8. Change to a plant-based diet. Or cut your consumption of sheep, cows, in particular. 9. Eat food grown locally to reduce carbon from transportation. 10. But the very best thing you can do is to tell your lawmakers that you support a tax on carbon. Tax the companies who take carbon out of the ground and have the government pass that money on to the people to buy energy. This will speed up the transition to solar, wind, and other forms of non-carbon energy.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

#Resistance?

History marches on and the road to Hell grows shorter with every step. At home, a generation of public school tyrants are drawing up plans to turn Britain into Europe’s answer to Singapore: arm sales and numbered accounts for the wealthy, zero-hour contracts for everyone else! Abroad, Trump’s presidency began with a series of executive orders that tore families asunder and debunked the carefully nurtured myth that the American political system was caught in a state of institutional deadlock. When Democrats take power, they wring their little hands and talk about the importance of working with the opposition in order to deliver incremental reforms. When Republicans take power, they start putting their enemies in camps.

These days, the news is never good…

Turning on the television or firing up social media means subjecting oneself to a torrent of anxiety-inducing headlines: Everything you need will soon be dismantled and everyone you love will be vaporised like an Afghan wedding. They say that a decade of continuous drone strikes have left the children of South Asia fearful of blue skies … how long until we are united in those fears?

Faced with so much worrying news, it is only natural to find oneself torn between fearful paralysis and an uncontrollable urge to do something, anything, in order to help make the world a slightly better place. From this violent emotional ambiguity is born the urge to resist, but not all #resistances are worthy of the name.

In his book Living in the End Times, the Estonian thinker Slavoj Žižek observes that businesses like Starbucks have found a way to make us feel good about doing the wrong thing. Painfully aware that they are a multinational corporation selling overpriced cups of cat piss while millions die of starvation, the humanoid lizards running the Starbucks empire began covering their shops with posters informing their customers that every cup of coffee helps to save part of the rainforest, protect indigenous populations, and generally teach the world to sing.

This muddying of the water resolves the tension between the consumer’s need to indulge their consumerist urges and their need to feel as though they are helping to make the world a better place. Though obvious from the way that we are sold coffee, this model of ethical consumerism now informs large chunks of pro-business liberal politics and inspires everything from the marketing of private health insurance to the selling of books.

Back in 2009, genre culture’s historic problems with racism and sexism were finally brought to a head by an epic dust-up with established authors and publishers on one side and readers from historically marginalised groups on the other. Often referred to by the increasingly dated nickname of Racefail, this dust-up inspired people to start challenging behaviour patterns that had allowed genre culture to become significantly less diverse than the rest of Western society. While the post-Racefail calls for greater diversity have unquestionably changed the face of genre culture, it is interesting to note how quickly moves to combat sexism and racism in genre culture as a whole ossified into a hollow boosterism designed to help promote the work of non-white, non-male, and non-straight authors. Racism, sexism, ableism, harassment, and bullying may well continue to make the lives of ordinary fans a complete misery but genre culture would rather celebrate the successes of the visible than wonder what happens to the people who disappear. The role of diversity in genre culture is like the role of environmentalism in the coffee business … it helps us to feel a little bit less shit about indulging our consumerist impulses by muddying the waters and allowing us to believe that buying books and magazines we were probably going to buy anyway is somehow making the world a better place.

Racefail presented the liberal-minded denizens of genre culture with an overwhelming ambivalence:

On the one hand, people were unable to move as the problem seemed intractable and doing the wrong thing was immeasurably worse than doing nothing at all. On the other hand, the exclusionary tendencies of genre culture were so pronounced that something needed to be done as soon as humanly possible. From this tension could have been born a root and branch reform of everything from convention programming to genre publishing but instead the tension wound up being resolved by the act of buying more books and magazines. As the full horror of contemporary politics begins to work its way into the fabric of genre culture, there is a real risk that the urge to radicalise and the need to do something will be turned into another excuse to sell us space operas and urban fantasies, but this is not resistance and it certainly isn’t progress.

Science fiction and fantasy are genres that deal explicitly in worlds that do not exist, but why would anyone want to read or write a story set in a world that isn’t real?

Tolkien’s famous essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ answers the question in psychological terms by claiming that the ordered story-like nature of fantastical worlds makes them resemble the ordered and story-like nature of the real world according to Christian myth. Thus, according to Tolkien, immersing yourself in a fantasy novel is a bit like being a Christian as your mind has gone to a place that is emotionally satisfying because it obeys the logic of stories. While this strikes me as more of a damning indictment than a stirring defence, it does raise the question as to whether escapism is psychologically and politically healthy.

Many critics of commercial storytelling describe genre literature as nothing more than a series of power fantasies in which readers are invited to identify with superheroes, heavily-armed cyborgs, and tedious boy wizards. In reality, the more damning critique of genre literature is that it provides the reader not with fantasies of power but fantasies of righteous violence in that it allows readers to immerse themselves in worlds that conform to their moral preferences. Indeed, the joy of reading old Superman comics lies not in the protagonist’s ability to leap tall buildings but in the knowledge that his ability to deploy overwhelming force in a manner that is beyond ethical reproach. In these simple worlds, moral problems are only ever as tricky as the bad guys are good at fighting. In the real world, even overwhelming power is no guarantee that you can make the world a better place.

The problem with reading genre literature is that it is never entirely clear when indulging your own sense of self-righteousness stops and genuinely helpful reading begins. We can all agree that old Superman cartoons are moral fantasies but what of novels like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother where opposition to tyrannical governments is just a question of hacking a games console and eating ‘ethnic’ food? What are the post-scarcity space operas of Iain M. Banks if not reassurances that even the best-intentioned superpowers wind up taking moral shortcuts? What are works of grimdark fantasy if not opportunities to immerse in worlds where people are free to behave like complete scumbags because they know that everyone and everything is just as morally bankrupt as they are? What is Joanna Russ’s The Female Man other than a series of worlds designed to illicit different emotional responses to different levels of institutional sexism?

Buying works of science fiction is not going to make the world a better place. In fact, our tendency to indulge the need for more stuff and more entertainment may actually be part of why the world is getting progressively worse. Maybe the moral and political value of books lays not in the quality of the ideas they contain but in their ability to inspire readers to get out there and make a difference. Buying escapist literature is not going to address the problems of racism, sexism and homophobia in our communities and it definitely isn’t going to make a difference to the global rise of fascism. Maybe the time has come to put down the books and get involved.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

The Voyage Home

My sense of place didn’t become fully alerted until I started writing.

Not that being a writer is in any way necessary to having a strong sense of place. Place is fundamental to identity, the where of recollection more intrinsic to its potency even than the when. We swap memories of place all the time. Whole eras of our lives become defined by the house or street or country we happened to occupy while that life was going on. My own earliest memories are themselves indivisible from place: the backyard of our terraced house in Nottingham, the infinite labyrinth of the London Underground, the creosote-smelling loggia of my grandmother’s seaside bungalow in Worthing. When dwelled upon for more than a moment, any of these thumbnail-sized memory-boxes can be made to telescope outwards and encompass a world.

Becoming a writer did not give me a sense of place so much as enhance the sense of place that comes as standard. Becoming a writer gave me a framework – a context – against which to gauge my reactions. Becoming a writer also ignited a passion for history at the local level, which gave me in its turn a vastly increased understanding of what history actually is. At the baseline level, history is houses, families, streets, the way individuals and communities interact with the broad-brush précis of history that is handed down to and enacted upon us via school textbooks or the six o’clock news.

Perhaps the greatest fictional interpretation of this basic truth I have yet encountered is Adam Thorpe’s novel Ulverton, which miraculously tardises more than three centuries of history into four hundred pages, all set within the confines of a single English village. My copy of Ulverton is a first edition, an ex-library copy withdrawn for sale from Merthyr Tidfil Central Library. The pages are browned at the margin, and the date stamp insert has been torn out, leaving ragged white remnants of paper clinging to the frontispiece. For a collector the book would be a severe disappointment, but I happen actively to prize old library copies, because they seem themselves to be a vibrant part of history, recollecting my own countless, indentity-defining visits to libraries as a child and young adult and giving me a sense of communion – if that is not too pretentious a word – with those readers in whatever location who took the book into their home and read it before me.

***

On the 23rd of December, we exchanged contracts on the sale of our house in Devon. By the time you read this, we will be putting up shelves and hanging pictures in our new home on the Isle of Bute, a medium-sized, moderately populated island in the Firth of Clyde. Even writing the words still feels strange, our house-move being for us personally the most tangibly concrete legacy of, not to say reaction to the wider historical convulsion that was 2016. Whilst it would be inaccurate to imply that we decided to move to Scotland solely because of Brexit, it would be entirely true to say that Brexit was the instigator, the engine driving a change we had come to accept we would need to make eventually. We are both in love with Scotland – not just with the landscape, but with the ideals it embodies: a small, outward-facing European nation that values inclusiveness and diversity as a core component of its 21st-century identity. A nation that appears to value a coherent and sustainable approach to environmental, social and economic policy. A nation with a thriving and robust literary, musical and artistic culture that seems actively to be valued by its political establishment. We found we wanted – instinctively, wholeheartedly – to be a part of that, to expend our energies in a place where they might be useful. So whilst at the start of 2016 we were not in the least expecting to be packing boxes and writing change of address emails at the end of it, we approach the task now with a stunned excitement that (more or less) entirely trumps the kind of Groundhog Day-weariness that would normally accompany it. We’re going. We’re really going.

***

Up until now, the only place I’ve felt truly at home in has been London. The illogical romantic in me likes to believe that this is because I was born within the sound of Bow bells, that the inexorable pull towards the city’s streets, communities and cultural infrastructure that I began to feel as young as seven or eight – the occasions