Interzone #270 (May-June 2017)

By TTA Press

The May–June issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by Christopher Mark Rose, Nathan Hillstrom, Wayne Simmons, Jonathan L. Howard, Malcolm Devlin, Emily B. Cataneo, and Shauna O'Meara. The cover artist for 2017 is Dave Senecal, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner and Dave Senecal. Features: Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, including an interview with Malcolm Devlin conducted by Peter Tennant); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment).

Cover Art:

417h3r105 v3 by 2017 cover artist Dave Senecal

Fiction:

Rushford Recapitulation by Christopher Mark Rose
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Like You, I Am A System by Nathan Hillstrom

Dirty Code by Wayne Simmons
illustrated by Dave Senecal

Encyphered by Jonathan L. Howard

The New Man by Malcolm Devlin
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Evangeline and the Forbidden Lighthouse by Emily B. Cataneo
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Memories of Fish by Shauna O'Meara

Interface:

Future Interrupted: The Incomplete Legacy of Racefail
Jonathan McCalmont

Time Pieces: All Over Bar the Shouting
Nina Allan

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone
Books reviewed include NEW YORK 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, NETHERSPACE by Andrew Lane & Nigel Foster, THE STARS ARE LEGION by Kameron Hurley, THE END OF THE DAY by Claire North, WICKED WONDERS by Ellen Klages, YOU WILL GROW INTO THEM by Malcolm Devlin (plus author interview conducted by Peter Tennant), WALKAWAY by Cory Doctorow

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, THE BOSS BABY, GET OUT, LIFE, LOGAN, KONG: SKULL ISLAND, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, GHOST IN THE SHELL, POWER RANGERS, PERSONAL SHOPPER

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: May 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370806195

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

interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

ISSUE #270

MAY-JUNE 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

[e-mail]

Events

Roy Gray

[e-mail]

© 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.

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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 270 MAY-JUNE 2017

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

COVER

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417h3r105 v3 by 2017 COVER ARTIST DAVE SENECAL

senecal.deviantart.com

INTERFACE

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

rushford recap 2.tif

RUSHFORD RECAPITULATION

CHRISTOPHER MARK ROSE

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

[e-mail] (email)

LIKE YOU, I AM A SYSTEM

NATHAN HILLSTROM

story

dirty_code.tif

DIRTY CODE

WAYNE SIMMONS

story illustrated by Dave Senecal

senecal.deviantart.com

encyphered.tif

ENCYPHERED

JONATHAN L. HOWARD

story

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THE NEW MAN

MALCOLM DEVLIN

novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

evangeline (text).tif

EVANGELINE AND THE FORBIDDEN LIGHTHOUSE

EMILY B. CATANEO

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

MEMORIES OF FISH

SHAUNA O’MEARA

story

malcolm-devlin.tif

MALCOLM DEVLIN

interviewed by Peter Tennant

REVIEWS

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BOOK ZONE

books, including an interview with Malcolm Devlin

Get-out-contents.tif

MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

The Incomplete Legacy of Racefail

The shortlists for the 2017 Hugo Awards are set to inspire little except complacency. With the collapse of the Sad Puppies and their Rabid chums reduced to nothing more than a pathetic personality cult, it is tempting to view the Best Novel shortlist as a victory for the forces of progress: two-thirds female, a majority of black and minority ethnic writers, and two trans authors certainly makes for a diverse collection of talents when compared to a historical baseline that is overwhelmingly dominated by straight, white, cis-gendered men. However, while this year’s big winners suggest that genre culture is continuing to get better at recognising a diverse range of voices, we still have a long way to go before we can even begin to think of genre culture as having overcome its historic addiction to racism.

The seeds for this year’s shortlist were planted in the winter of 2009. In January of that year, the author Elizabeth Bear wrote a blog post about the challenges involved in writing characters from different racial and cultural groups. Discussion started quite politely but it soon became a lightning rod for anger at genre literature’s terrible track record when it comes to questions of race. As the conversation became more heated, it split along racial and professional lines resulting in two broad camps: well-connected genre professionals who resented all criticism of their (predominantly white) friends, and dozens of black and minority ethnic fans who were sick of being dismissed and ignored. It is hard to isolate a single moment in a conversation that spanned thousands of comments and hundreds of blogs but I believe that genre culture revealed its true colours on the day that a prominent (and since promoted) figure in American genre publishing described a group of BAME fans as being of sub-normal intelligence. The fact that his wife then threatened to start a publishing blacklist only served to illustrate the complete contempt that genre culture has had for people from historically marginalised groups.

Often referred to simply as ‘Racefail’ these discussions form one of the most significant moments in the history of genre culture. It is impossible to look back over the last eight years in science fiction without seeing a single, sustained movement to challenge and dismantle the historic racism of genre culture. Unfortunately, while this year’s Hugo shortlist may suggest that a better future is nearly upon us, this future is far from equally distributed.

One of the most significant legacies of Racefail is that it finally put paid to the idea that genre culture is more inclusive and liberal than the ‘mundane’ social spaces that surround it. Unquestioned well into the early 2000s, this myth endured because the people who feel excluded and unwelcome in genre spaces tend not to stick around long enough to share their experiences. With nobody around to describe the ugly side of genre culture, the history of fandom was written and re-written by the fans and professionals who had managed to make friends, acquire followings, and generally make something of themselves in genre spaces. Racefail destroyed the myth of genre inclusivity by a) making it clear quite how many black and minority ethnic people read science fiction but don’t participate in genre culture, and b) giving genre professionals a platform on which to display the attitudes and behaviour patterns that had made black and minority ethnic people uncomfortable in the first place.

Racefail made it clear that genre culture has serious and systemic social problems. The question of how the institutions comprising genre culture should respond to those problems cannot be disentangled from the broader political question of how Western societies should respond to their own problems with racism, sexism, and generalised economic inequality. While the global financial crisis of 2008 has seen the rise and fall of several political formations, responses to the crisis can be positioned according to a set of coordinates that measure their politics not only from left-to-right but also according to their willingness to do away with existing social structures. This secondary axis was most evident during the recent American elections when left-of-centre voters were presented with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

While both candidates argued that America’s social problems could be fixed by somehow making capitalism a bit nicer, Sanders presented himself as the candidate more willing to make radical changes. As the now infamous ‘America is Already Great’ slogan suggests, Clinton had no interest in changing the fundamental structure of American society. The problem was not that American institutions were making the rich richer and the poor poorer by creating a hugely privileged ruling class, but that the American 1% was less ethnically diverse than America as a whole. This idea that social problems arising from the injustices of capitalism can somehow be solved simply by getting more women of colour into boardrooms is also responsible for restricting genre culture’s ability to act on the lessons of Racefail.

Rather than broadening out into a generalised discussion of how every aspect of genre culture responds to the presence of people from historically marginalised groups, the desire to confront prejudice within our own communities has been restricted to a form of hollow boosterism that limits itself to the provision of free PR and blatantly self-serving campaigns designed to get more women and people of colour onto award shortlists. What of the black and minority ethnic people who are not established authors? What of the black and minority ethnic people who do not have novels to sell? What of the black and minority ethnic people who are not missed when they disappear?

The scope of the problem was made obvious last summer when Cecily Kane, Ethan Robinson, and Weston Allen published #BlackSpecFic, a report funded by the Fireside Fiction company into the racial character of the short fiction scene. What they found was that out of over 2000 short stories published in the world of science fiction during the year 2015, only 38 were by black authors. When prompted to look into the situation, the Science Fiction Writers of America talked about helping out known black authors and encouraging editors to read submissions blind but they completely failed to realise that the power of the report lies in what it tells us about the fate of people who are not yet known to genre audiences. If only 38 stories by black authors were published in 2015, how many were rejected across the board? How many black and minority people never bothered to submit to genre venues? How many people of colour never bothered to write or participate in genre culture because they (rightly as it turns out) instinctively feared rejection?

Genre culture stands at a crossroads. Turn right and the system will remain unchanged; genre institutions have elevated a handful of black and minority ethnic people who will feature prominently on award shortlists for years to come. Trilogies will be nominated, contracts will be signed, and champagne will be drunk as the grandees of genre culture look back over the recent past and convince themselves that a handful of exceptions not only make the rule but also help us to atone for generations of systemic racism. Meanwhile, out in the darkness of the internet, countless black and ethnic minority genre readers will bounce off our social spaces and never make the kinds of contribution they are capable of making. Their perspectives and brilliance lost forever. While I suspect that this is precisely the kind of future that we are going to wind up getting, it does not necessarily need to be this way.

Turn left and our anti-racist initiatives can start to benefit even the most isolated fan. Maybe we can take a long, hard look at all of those crowd-funded magazines and start asking why they seem to be exclusively run by white people. Then we can start asking about the demographics of publishing houses and ask ourselves whether we really want to continue buying books from companies with white supremacist hiring practices. Change is not about prizes, it’s about reforming the institutions that shape our experiences on a daily basis. If genre culture is really interested in change then let it change properly and for ever.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

All Over Bar the Shouting

Although it is the controversies that tend to draw attention at the time, book awards are usually more interesting in retrospect, when the fuss has died down. It is only with hindsight that we begin to see if the outrage over the shortlist was in fact worth the word-count expended upon it, whether, in the broader sweep of history, the winning novel was actually anything more than a flash in the pan.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award is no exception to this rule, particularly since science fiction readers tend to have long memories. The Clarke Award is thirty-one years old this year, and people are still talking about whether Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was the most sensible choice for a winner back in 1987. The fallout from the notorious ‘lit-fic’ shortlist of 2008 is still drifting about the blogosphere, pulsing radiation. Looking back at that shortlist now, it is difficult to see what all the fuss was about, especially since it was a work of hard SF from a core genre imprint – Richard Morgan’s Black Man, published by Gollancz – that won through in the end.

Organising and participating in this year’s shadow Clarke jury is turning out to be a pleasure on multiple levels, not least exchanging thoughts and opinions and discoveries with my fellow Sharkes. Speaking purely for myself though, the most significant effect of this experiment has been to make me question the very validity of ‘science fiction’ as a literary genre. In a literary landscape where everything is up for grabs, and where the tropes of science fiction – time travel, genetic and social engineering, apocalypse scenarios of every variety, artificial intelligence and mass surveillance – are increasingly becoming both core subject matter and metaphorical framing device for novelists of every nation and literary inheritance, can we usefully continue to argue for science fiction as a literature apart, worthy not just of separate study but of special pleading?

From the dawn of science fiction – and I’ll leave the Shelleyites and the Gernsbackians to argue that one out for themselves – both readers and critics of science fiction have passionately maintained that science fiction is different, that it should not be forced to comply with the literary values of mainstream literature because as a so-called literature of ideas, its power and central purpose lie elsewhere. You would not expect a science fiction writer to concern themselves with the minute dissection of a cosmonaut’s personal relationships and childhood trauma when their primary interest is focussed upon the possibilities and moral conundrums thrown up by the logistics, mechanics and – possibly – the wider philosophy of firing human beings into space. Readers of science fiction are drawn to it precisely because of its willingness to grapple with ‘the big questions’. No one asked for a side-serving of existential angst to go with that, thank you very much.

In other words, and to stick a pin in the literary timeline just for a moment, why should Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, published in 1966, be held to the same mainstream literary standards as John Fowles’s The Magus – also published in 1966 – when the aims and purpose of science fiction as literature are entirely different?

Are they, though? Or to rephrase the question slightly, are they now?

For many years, the argument for special pleading might have held good. Throughout the decades when the literary establishment concerned itself almost entirely with mimesis, and where the mere suggestion that ‘sci-fi’ could be a valid, much less valuable tool for creative expression was enough to send a writer or critic to literary Coventry, the conversation around science fiction as a distinct and separate mode of literature formed a radical and vibrant alternative to the consensus. Science fiction was doing something important, bringing to the fore not just a set of ideas but an imaginative, speculative approach that was simply not attempted or talked about in canonical circles.

The same arguments do not hold true today, and have not held true for more than a decade. The high priests of SF, anxious to maintain the genre’s privileged status, often decry writers of literary fiction who experiment with science fictional devices as ‘tourists’ – interlopers and carpetbaggers, fair-weather friends who are not interested in SF so much as stealing its cool and who in any case are ‘doing it wrong’. They’re doing it wrong, these doyens insist, because the ideas they are hijacking are familiar and outmoded in science fictional terms. They waste too much time talking about the astronaut’s mother and not enough speculating over whether potatoes really can be grown in human excrement.

In trotting out these arguments, how many science fiction commentators stop to ask themselves – in a genre landscape almost wholly consumed by pumping out copycat series fiction, grimdark fantasy and endlessly repetitive YA dystopia – how many truly innovative, truly radical works of echt science fiction are actually now being published in any given year?

What the shadow Clarke project has led me to ask most of all is whether the precepts of SF special pleading are now simply being used to lend critical weight to works that could not otherwise sustain it. Or, to put it another way, to excuse bad books.

***

In looking back over past Clarke Award shortlists, and in the arbitrary manner demanded by such pronouncements, I have come to see 2005 as a landmark year – a