Interzone #274 (March-April 2018)

By TTA Press

The March–April issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new long and short stories by James Sallis, Antony Johnston, Julie C. Day, Alexandra Renwick, T.R. Napper, Michael Reid, and Eliot Fintushel. The cover artist for 2018 is Vince Haig (on the theme of abductees), and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Features: Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, plus an interview with Sam J. Miller); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); and a guest editorial by Antony Johnston.

Cover art: Abductees 1 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

Fiction:

Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway by James Sallis

Soul Music by Antony Johnston
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Schrödinger's by Julie C. Day
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Never the Twain by Michael Reid
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Opium for Ezra by T.R. Napper
illustrated by Martin Hanford

baleen, baleen by Alexandra Renwick

Zen by Eliot Fintushel

Features:

Guest Editorial
Antony Johnston

Future Interrupted: Infinite Diversity in Repressive Combinations
Jonathan McCalmont

Time Pieces: The Gernsback Conundrum
Nina Allan

Ansible Link: News, obituaries
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (plus interview conducted by Maureen Kincaid Speller), Mad Hatters and March Hares edited by Ellen Datlow, Science Fiction: A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst, The Queen of All Crows by Rod Duncan, Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell, Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift, Dark State by Charles Stross, Blood Binds the Pack by Alex Wells, The Smoke by Simon Ings, Improbable Botany edited by Gary Dalkin

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include The Shape of Water, Black Panther, Coco, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Attraction, Jupiter's Moon, Downsizing

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370553204

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 #274

MARCH–APRIL 2018

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]

© 2018 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 274 MARCH-APRIL 2018

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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ABDUCTEES 1 by 2018 COVER ARTIST VINCE HAIG

www.barquing.com

INTERFACE

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EDITORIAL

ANTONY JOHNSTON

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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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BEAUTIFUL QUIET OF THE ROARING FREEWAY

JAMES SALLIS

story

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SOUL MUSIC

ANTONY JOHNSTON

novelette illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

warwickfrasercoombe.blogspot.co.uk

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SCHRODINGER’S

JULIE C. DAY

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

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NEVER THE TWAIN

MICHAEL REID

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

[e-mail] (email)

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OPIUM FOR EZRA

T.R. NAPPER

story illustrated by Martin Hanford

martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

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baleen, baleen

ALEXANDRA RENWICK

story

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ZEN

ELIOT FINTUSHEL

story

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SAM J. MILLER

interviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller

REVIEWS

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BOOK ZONE

books

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MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films

EDITORIAL

ANTONY JOHNSTON

Do influences really matter?

It’s hard to think of a genre that places such an importance on literary influence as science fiction. Fantasy, perhaps, but the perpetual darkness of JRRT’s shadow is so inky-black that only the very brightest lights even trouble its penumbra. By contrast, in SF two short stories and a novella is enough to have someone pointing at another writer and shouting how you influenced them.

No other genre poses the dreaded question, Who are you influenced by? quite so readily. Even fellow pulps like crime and romance aren’t as thoroughly referenced.

I’ll be the first to declare mine, though a funny thing I’ve discovered over the years is that to me, they glare like sunlight after an eclipse; whereas to you they might remain forever in darkness lest I point them out.

Within the first half-dozen lines of ‘Soul Music’, some will surely be clear. Oh, he’s a Gibson fan; well, who isn’t? But there’s more, of course. A touch of Noon-ish music-obsessed subculture, some parallels to the early cyberpunks, a hint of Effingerian squalor.

But what you (probably) can’t see, because you’re (probably) not inside my mind or (probably) living my life, are the morse-flashes that leave barely an afterimage on the retina. A scene that makes me picture a Michael Whelan painting; a character trait I picked up reading Ursula K. Le Guin as a child; an archetype that brings John Brunner to mind. Even fainter are the synaesthesiac glints: a passage that urges me to fire up a Sisters of Mercy playlist, or the moves I stole from an avant-garde violinist I once saw in Brooklyn.

(Then there’s Interzone itself, of course. Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Nicholas Royle, and more – so many writers I discovered within these pages since picking up that first Now monthly! issue almost thirty years ago. How could that not affect the way I think about SF, the way I write? How could that not affect how I feel about being published here myself for the first time?)

When all’s said and done, what are we but our influences? You might think that suggestion reductive or fatalistic, but I find the idea liberating, because it counter-intuitively ensures our individuality.

If we’re all influenced by everything that we encounter, then by definition none of us can be influenced by the same things in the same ways. You and I might read the same book, but everything else we’ve consumed up to that point will influence the lens through which we interpret it, and so guarantee our reactions are different; different favourite scenes, different thoughts on its themes…different ways it will influence our own life and work in the future.

Influences matter, and perhaps more than you think. Or less.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

Infinite Diversity in Repressive Combinations

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Future Interrupted began in the shadow of Paul Kincaid’s wonderful 2012 essay ‘The Widening Gyre’. Published in the LA Review of Books, Kincaid’s piece surveyed a number of Year’s Best short fiction anthologies and concluded that The overwhelming sense one gets (…) is exhaustion. Kincaid’s essay remains a brilliant exploration of a culture teetering on the brink of economic and creative collapse but we are no longer living in 2012… This is the future and our narrative must yield to the overwhelming pressures of reality.

Nowadays, rather than dwelling on the field’s creative problems and asking why it is that many of the field’s more ambitious and experimental writers find themselves being forced onto smaller and smaller publishing platforms, SFF stresses a narrative of increased diversity. This broad cultural narrative is not without basis in reality as women writers have come to dominate award shortlists on both sides of the Atlantic while BAME authors have become increasingly visible and celebrated. We should also consider the way that, unlike related fields such as comics and gaming, SFF responded to a right-wing insurgency by shutting the door in its face and doubling down on a process of change that was already well underway when a bunch of third rate fantasy authors decided to throw their toys out of the pram. This narrative flatters SFF’s still-overwhelmingly white institutions and it certainly makes SFF seem welcoming to people from historically-marginalised groups but it is not the whole story.

Late last year, the film and TV streaming site Netflix began to release episodes of a new Star Trek series. Set between the events of Enterprise and the original series, Star Trek: Discovery stars an African American actress by the name of Sonequa Martin-Green. The series’ pre-release PR campaign leaned heavily on the historical significance of having a black female protagonist and, as is increasingly the case with large pop culture franchises, all concerns about directions the series might have been headed in were immediately dismissed as yet more proof of fannish racism and converted into a spite-fuelled justification for watching the show.

Initially, Discovery worked quite hard to earn its social justice credentials. Aside from casting Martin-Green as a junior officer on a ship commanded by Malaysian-born Michelle Yeoh, the series lavished attention on the relationship between these two BAME women and hinted at diasporic narratives by presenting Martin-Green’s character as a woman trapped between two cultures as a human child raised by Vulcans only to then struggle with the cultural subtleties of integrating a workplace dominated by human cultures and attitudes. Unfortunately, as the series progressed, its focus began to shift and what began as a great work of Feminist SF soon devolved into a reactionary mess.

The rot began to set in when a moment of intellectual arrogance compounded by bizarre feelings of parental attachment resulted in Martin-Green’s character murdering an alien religious figure resulting in the Federation being dragged into a genocidal conflict with the Klingon Empire. Since then, Star Trek: Discovery has indulged every right-wing fantasy from the moral necessity of torture through to the inevitability of what is effectively metaphorical racial holy war.

Like most contemporary Military SF, Star Trek: Discovery finds itself in the business of having its cake and eating it too: On the one hand, it wants to revel in the atavistic joys of morally-righteous slaughter and the sense of vicarious empowerment that comes from seeing your enemies broken on the rack of state violence. On the other hand, it wants to indulge the audience’s understandable desire for escape to a more just and sensitive world. The ground rules for this kind of ‘liberal’ military science fiction were first laid down by Robert A. Heinlein whose Starship Troopers double-fisted dark forest gateau by imagining a form of ‘woke’ fascism under which gender, race, and class were no impediment to becoming a highly respected space Nazi.

While popular opposition to the Vietnam War may have inspired writers like Iain M. Banks and Joe Haldeman to question the conceptual viability of a liberal space empire, a more powerful response to liberal militarism played out under the auspices of Feminist SF where leftist writers dared to experiment with narratives rooted in hope and generosity rather than the violent imposition of a superior moral order. I would even go so far as to argue that Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy might have less to do with the deconstruction of gender than with her sustained assault on science fiction’s horrifying tendency to seek ways of indulging and perpetuating an appetite for destruction that is forced upon us by the institutions of the imperialist state.

Much like today’s John Scalzi, Ann Leckie, and Yoon Ha Lee the writers of Star Trek: Discovery have fallen into the trap of thinking that because narratives of reaction are familiar and constantly reinforced by right-wing institutions, they are somehow inherently more fun and compelling than narratives that speak directly to our lived experience. We like to think that science fiction has evolved since the days of Heinlein but in reality progressive science fiction just means reactionary narratives written by and featuring people from a broader range of genders, races, and sexualities.

As this is to be my last column for Interzone, I beg your collective indulgence for the sin of speculation: When tomorrow’s critics look back on contemporary science fiction they will see neither the exhaustion spoken of in the early teens by Paul Kincaid and myself, nor the transformative politics cheered on by today’s genre establishment. Instead, they will speak of a cultural bottleneck.

Today’s genre culture is literally overflowing with short stories exploring the lived experiences of the oppressed and marginalised. Stories that revel neither in violence nor domination, but in the simple power of a genre metaphor applied to things that ordinary people know to be true. This wellspring of passion and creativity has already proved so productive as to completely overwhelm the field’s limited critical apparatus but while the entire field seems to vibrate with the more-or-less explicit energies of radical politics and demands for social justice, genre publishers retain an unhealthy and outdated addiction to the kinds of science fiction stories that should be a thing of the past.

Genre publishing’s reluctance to embrace the change of emphasis that is already evident at shorter length has created a cultural impasse that will either be resolved by changes in genre publishing or by changes in how works of science fiction find their way to readers. Aside from the writers who are already being forced onto small presses and crowd-funding platforms, we can also speak of the writers who never even bother submitting their novels to genre publishers in the first place. Tor’s new line of novellas could be an opportunity to widen the neck of the bottle by testing the waters for more ambitious and personal works but the future may not hang around long enough for genre publishing to catch up. I began my time as a columnist imagining our vision of the future as having been interrupted, I end it convinced that it has merely been occluded by incompetence, cowardice, and bigotry. The future of science fiction is here, we just need to clear the institutional blockage and get things flowing again.

TIME PIECES

NINA ALLAN

The Gernsback Conundrum

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I began writing this column just as the Hugo nominations opened for another year. Which started me thinking, not only about what might get nominated or what hitherto unforeseen scandal might rock the awards for the umpteenth year running, but also about the man for whom the Hugos are named: Hugo Gernsback, famously dubbed the ‘father of science fiction’ and considered by many within fandom (especially US fandom) to be the man who invented science fiction in the first place.

With the first publication of the magazine Amazing Stories in 1926, science fiction was given a rallying point. Soon afterwards, Gernsback’s ‘Science Fiction League’ – the first public association specifically for the discussion and sharing and enjoyment of science fiction literature and ideas – gave science fiction fans a rallying point also. The rest, as they say, is history. And whilst Gernsback the editor was reputedly a swindler and a crook, underpaying his writers to the point of theft whilst allocating himself a generous salary, his importance to the genre of science fiction as an instigator and as an organiser is seldom questioned. Without Gernsback, maintain the true believers, there might have been no American pulp tradition, the cornerstone on which so much of contemporary SFF is built. Without Gernsback, there might be no World Science Fiction Association, no raft of specialist SF magazines, no Hugos.

Reflecting on the matter these past few days, I’ve found myself thinking – oh, heresy! – so what?? What if there had been no Gernsback? I’m now wondering if science fiction might ultimately have been better off without him.

I did not come to science fiction through Hugo Gernsback, or any of the magazines or writers he promoted. I came to science fiction through H.G. Wells and Jules Verne – whose pirated works Gernsback used to fill out the pages of his first edition of Amazing Stories – and through John Wyndham, John Christopher and Philippa Pearce. Wells himself described his first four novels – now key texts within certain versions of the science fiction canon – not as science fiction, but as scientific romances. John Wyndham’s novels of post-war austerity and Cold War anxiety were promoted by Michael Joseph no differently from any of the other contemporary fiction they were publishing at the time. Jules Verne considered his ‘voyages extraordinaires’ as the natural expression of his love of travel and curiosity about the modern world. He did not