Interzone #272 (September-October 2017)

By TTA Press

The September–October issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by Aliya Whiteley, Paul Jessup, T.R. Napper, and Erica L. Satifka. 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, including interviews with Adam Roberts and Hal Duncan); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and a personal recollection of Brian W. Aldiss by Andy Hedgecock.

Cover art: 417h3r105 v5 by Dave Senecal

Fiction:

Blessings Erupt by Aliya Whiteley
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Music of Ghosts by Paul Jessup
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Ghosts of a Neon God by T.R. Napper

The Goddess of the Highway by Erica L. Satifka
illustrated by Vincent Sammy

Features:

Brian W. Aldiss: Present Readership Excepted
A Personal Recollection by Andy Hedgecock

Future Interrupted: Use Your Allusion
Jonathan McCalmont

Time Pieces: Starting from the End: the Anatomy of Post-SF
Nina Allan

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts (plus in-depth interview with the author by Jo Lindsay Walton), Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Iain M. Banks by Paul Kincaid, The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, Xeelee: Vengeance by Stephen Baxter, A Scruffian Survival Guide by Hal Duncan (plus author interview by Elaine Gallagher), A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon
Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include The Dark Tower, War for the Planet of the Apes, Cars 3, Despicable Me 3, The Emoji Movie, Genocidal Organ, Shin Godzilla, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Captain Underpants, A Ghost Story, It Comes at Night, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, The Untamed

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370172832

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 #272

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2017

Publisher

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

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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

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Events

Roy Gray

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© 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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INTERZONE 272 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2017

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2017

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

COVER

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417h3r105 v5 by 2017 COVER ARTIST DAVE SENECAL

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INTERFACE

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EDITORIAL: PRESENT COMPANY EXCEPTED

ANDY HEDGECOCK

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FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

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TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

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ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

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BLESSINGS ERUPT

ALIYA WHITELEY

novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

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THE MUSIC OF GHOSTS

PAUL JESSUP

story illustrated by Martin Hanford

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GHOSTS OF A NEON GOD

T.R. NAPPER

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THE GODDESS OF THE HIGHWAY

ERICA L. SATIFKA

novelette illustrated by Vincent Sammy

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ADAM ROBERTS & HAL DUNCAN

interviewed by Jo Lindsay Walton & Elaine Gallagher

REVIEWS

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BOOK ZONE

books, including interviews with Adam Roberts and Hal Duncan

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MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films

EDITORIAL

ANDY HEDGECOCK

Brian W. Aldiss: Present Readership Excepted

A Personal Recollection

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Many years ago I heard Pat Kane conduct a clumsy interview with Brian Aldiss on Radio 4: Kane was treated to a polite but emphatic battering. So when I was asked to interview Aldiss for The Third Alternative in 2003, I was a little nervous. I needn’t have worried: he didn’t suffer fools gladly, including this fool – nonsense, move on – but he was generous with his time and profligate with his witty asides, and he went out of his way to offer encouragement. He had a combative attitude to consumerism, corporate greed, religion, literary snobbery and – occasionally – science fiction and its ‘communities’.

"Fans threatened to break my legs when they first read Billion Year Spree – cretinous illiterates that they were. Of course things have settled down a bit over the years, but I am still a constitutional non-joiner."

The constitutional non-joiner was attracted by sf’s potential as a literature for outsiders when he returned to the UK from Southeast Asia after World War II. He found it hard to deal with the stagnant social order of the country of his birth, and was dissatisfied with a mainstream literature which, he felt, ignored the significant global changes and threats of the postwar period.

In order to engage with an unstable world, the deadly realism of the older type of novel is surely inadequate. That is why so much present day sf has a strong flavour of the fantastic to it. How else to cope with reality?

Aldiss began helping me cope with reality in the late 1970s, initially through the sf anthologies he edited with Harry Harrison and his short story ‘The Bang Bang’ – a tale of exploitation, identity and the instability of self – which became the novella and film Brothers of the Head. These gems led to a treasure chest of stories – fantastic, sfnal, realistic, autobiographical, philosophical and surreal.

Even Aldiss’ earliest stories, written in the 1950s, exhibited a highly original approach in terms of theme and style. Non-Stop, a novel that blended conventional sf invention, but has an anti-heroic tone and the plot unfolds to reveal a massive cosmic joke underpinning its many mysteries.

In his book on the creative imagination, The Strength to Dream, the writer and critic Colin Wilson reflected on Aldiss’ story ‘Outside’: In a story of less than five thousand words, Mr Aldiss has succeeded in creating an effective symbol of the human condition and posing the problem ‘Who am I?’ in a new and startling way.

The work Aldiss produced in the 1960s was a revelation. Greybeard tells the story of an ecological calamity stemming from human aggression and stupidity. There is mass infertility and forests reclaim the Earth. It’s a smartly structured and sad quest story that offers a note of hope. The themes of sustainability and human beings as custodians of the planet informed much of Aldiss’ work, but his perspective was always balanced between the needs of humanity and those of our ecosystem.

The higher you climb up the totem pole, the greedier you get. From this factor stems one source of our global problems: the greed for oil. Am I advocating going back to the horse and cart? Certainly not. The problem is too complex, too circular for that: we have better dentistry and medical treatment because of fossil fuels and their use.

His novel Barefoot in the Head, a tale of the aftermath of pharmaceutical warfare, became one of the defining works of sf’s ‘new wave’. It’s the story of Britain in a drug-induced stupor of messianic fervour, mystical revolution and mass betrayal. Aldiss uses a fragmented structure and quasi-Joycean stream of consciousness style to heighten the sense of social collapse and ambiguous perception.

Life was going on, drugs were going in. It occurred to me that it merely needed an ill-intentioned person to pour a bucket of LSD into Staines Reservoir to ruin, not only J.G. Ballard’s career, but the entire social structure of Britain. An ideal time for false messiahs to arise.

His seminal antinovel, Report on Probability A (1968) also used an unconventional structure, its regressive narrative challenging the expectations of sf readers.

I have often questioned the scaffolding of traditional narrative structure; it has no denouement; it is coitus without orgasm.

Arguably, Aldiss’ most ambitious work of the 1970s was The Malacia Tapestry (1976), a baroque fantasy and love story set in an eternal, never changing city. Malacia, has the trappings of late medieval culture, but has not changed for millennia. It’s a vibrant place steeped in stagnant traditional and superstition, and crammed with mountebanks, actors, artists and craftsmen on the make – but innovation and development are forbidden. When an artistically-driven revolution is attempted, chaos follows. On one level, this is a traditional fantasy tale with richly imagined citizens, creatures and built environment, but it also contains some telling sideswipes on the themes of snobbery, class and social stasis. It is a story more relevant to the Britain of the 1970s than is originally apparent.

Perhaps I function best as a satirist; a satirist is a man who loathes his target and yet, from a perverse affection, does not necessarily wish it to go away. Especially, that is, if his target is the human race.

Other works of note in the 1970s were The Eighty Minute Hour (1974), a spectacular post-nuclear conflict space opera with actual singing; Last Orders (1979), an enigmatic, unsettling and witty story collection in which sf, absurd realism and fantasy collide; and Frankenstein Unbound (1973), filmed by Roger Corman and concerning the collision of a 21st century politician with Frankenstein and Mary Shelley in 19th century Switzerland. The impulse to retell the Frankenstein story stemmed from Aldiss’ authorship of Billion Year Spree, in which he expressed his enthusiasm for a book he considered to be the most daring of 19th century novels and set out his understanding of its place in the history of weird literature.

I determined to write a novel in parallel with Mary Shelley’s to erase the dominant horror aspect. The impulse was in part exegetical, in part admiration. The story of Mary Shelley and her creature, the embodiment of her own orphaned feelings is a magical one. She does indeed ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature’, as she claimed to do.

The Helliconia Trilogy (1982–5) chronicles the rise and fall of a civilisation on an Earth-like planet over a period of 1000 years. This takes place as Helliconia moves through its seasons, each of which lasts for hundreds of years. The book draws on James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and similar scientific theories characterising our planet as a set of complex and interdependent ecological systems, but it is also concerned with the paradox of the frailty and tenacity of civilisation. There are two competing intelligent life forms on the planet – humans and phagors – and there is a space station from Earth, The Avernus, whose inhabitants contemplate the morality of intervening in Helliconia, before descending into madness and sexual perversion. Many critics see the trilogy as Aldiss’ magnum opus – with some justification. This is a world with richly imagined histories, eco-systems, geographical features, belief systems and people. The language is beautiful and the place threatens to ooze from the page and swamp the contours of our own world. It doesn’t need to of course, we already live in Helliconia – the humans on the planet, the bovine and horned phagors and the insanely debauched crew of the Avernus are all aspects of ourselves. In this, and many other books, Aldiss tackled sex with a degree of directness and humour seldom found in sf and fantasy.

The subject of sex is constantly on our minds. Of course you write about it. The rather prissy popular sf with which I grew up was totally mute on the subject, or else totally inept. I had to have a go! Serious though sexual matters are, they are, like all serious things, a subject for comedy.

Aldiss was publishing innovative and engaging work well into his seventies. There is the anthology Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (2001), the title story of which provided the basis for the Steven Spielberg film AI: Artificial Intelligence. The overarching themes of the collection are those of the author’s long career – collective greed, the dangers of untrammelled capitalism, inhuman behaviour and patriarchal stupidity. He also produced the sharp, alarming and amusing satire Super-State (2002). Aldiss’ vision of a European super-state is now seriously at odds with the drift of political history, but his observations about class, wealth, consumerism, sex, climate change and human ignorance remain vital. Aldiss remained an angry and entertaining writer throughout his life, and his mission was clear.

"I wouldn’t think anyone reading Super-State would imagine I had mellowed. Not when I seek to prove that all humanity is not sane – present readership excepted, of course."

Of the many interviews commissioned by Andy Cox over the past nineteen years, the one with Aldiss is one of my favourites. Aldiss is one of my literary heroes. He played a pivotal role in defining the new wave, which first drew me to sf; he was one of the first writers to tackle environmental sustainability with any degree of seriousness and throughout his work – autobiographical, fantastic, science-fictional – he was one of few artists of any kind to highlight the increasingly absurd dominance of consumerism over society.

Consumerism has much to answer for: it is one of the cancers on the backside of capitalism.

Squeezing information out of your literary heroes is a high risk business – you desperately hope they won’t say anything to tarnish your enjoyment of their work. Brian Aldiss was funny, forthright, biting and genial – sometimes all within the same sentence – and, while he took his work seriously, he wasn’t precious about his status or reputation. He shared his enthusiasms freely: he admired Iain M. Banks, Tolstoy and Philip K. Dick – Aldiss was a ‘Dickhead’ in the best sense of the word.

There have been few authors in any era with Brian Aldiss’ energy, creativity and ability to entertain. Editor, critic, sf historian and, above all, a writer who provoked philosophical, social, political and scientific speculation – he will be missed.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

Use Your Allusion

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We live in an age where we are constantly under siege from other people’s recommendations. This makes it useful to know what it is that we actually enjoy. This may seem self-evident but we are seldom as psychologically transparent as we would like to believe and sometimes it takes a bit of time to understand and unpack why we respond to particular works in particular ways.

Shadowing this year’s Clarke award provided me with an excellent example of this phenomenon as I found myself having wildly different reactions to very similar uses of the same literary technique. Indeed, while Joanna Kavenna’s A Field Guide to Reality made my heart swell and my mind race, Becky Chambers’ use of the exact same literary technique in A Closed and Common Orbit left me feeling patronised and frustrated. While it might be comforting to say that my reactions differed because one book is demonstrably better than the other, I think it is worth taking the time to explore what it is that I actually mean by ‘better’.

The technique in question is best described as allusion; a passing reference to a complex set of ideas designed to provoke a particular intellectual or emotional response. For example, in the 2008 monster movie Cloverfield, director Matt Reeves draws on images associated with 9/11 as a means of forging a connection between the audience’s experience of the film and their residual memories of the terrorist attacks. Similarly, when the time came for Reeves to direct War for the Planet of the Apes, he had Woody Harrelson’s character shave his head as a means of a) suggesting a psychological similarity with Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, and b) inviting the audience to view the film as being imbued with a similar set of themes.

This style of allusion often strikes me as nothing more than lazy storytelling that draws on existing responses to familiar ideas rather than putting in the work required to elicit fresh responses. Had Reeves actually wanted to make a film about how war dehumanises us by dissolving our moral compass, then he should have made that film rather than making a morally simplistic film in which the characters happen to wander past a sign that reads Heart of Darkness. Similarly, if Becky Chambers wanted to write about Trans liberation then she should have written a book about the experiences and challenges facing Trans people rather than suggesting that being a trans woman is a bit like having an allergy to tattoo ink and not being trusted with a Wi-Fi password.

These kinds of allusions feel closed and reductive because they reduce both the world and our experience of it down to an act of recognition, as though one thing being like another is somehow all we ever need to know. As anyone who has studied psychology will be able to tell you, human cognition is full of lazy short-cuts and simplifications but what is art for if not to challenge our laziness and invite us to think again? Allusion should encourage thought and uncertainty, not seek to eradicate them altogether.

An altogether different approach to the art of allusion can be found in the cinematic tradition that gave us films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Nostalgia…films that view allusion as a desperate but flawed attempt to make sense of an incomprehensible world. Though seldom recognised, this approach to the use of allusion is absolutely central to a certain style of speculative fiction.

One interesting place to encounter this style of writing is in the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. While Kiernan has long-since proved that she is physically incapable of writing an ugly book, her novels The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl are as insightful as they are uncomfortably candid. Both novels offer us the portrait of a psychologically vulnerable woman who attaches herself to a local ghost story in an attempt to make sense of her increasingly distorted experiences. However, while this act of attachment invites the reader to begin experiencing the novels as works of genre fiction, we soon realise that the attachment was really nothing more than a defence mechanism, a desperate bid by an unravelling mind to make sense of a world that defies comprehension. From these uncertainties are born novels that explore the shattered ground between reality, fiction, madness, mythology, and the supernatural. In these worlds, allusion is not so much a lifebelt as an unexpectedly vicious undertow.

Surprisingly similar to the work