Interzone #280 (March-April 2019)

By TTA Press

The March–April 2019 issue contains new cutting edge science fiction and fantasy by Shauna O'Meara, Maria Haskins, Nicholas Kaufmann, Val Nolan, and Sarah Brooks. The 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner and Martin Hanford. Features: Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Book Zone (book reviews); Andy Hedgecock's Future Interrupted (comment); Aliya Whiteley's Climbing Stories (comment); guest editorial by Shauna O'Meara.

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

Fiction:

Cyberstar by Val Nolan
illustrated by Richard Wagner

And You Shall Sing to Me a Deeper Song by Maria Haskins
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Coriander for the Hidden by Nicholas Kaufmann

Everything Rising, Everything Starting Again by Sarah Brooks

'Scapes Made Diamond by Shauna O'Meara
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Features:

Guest Editorial
Shauna O'Meara

Future Interrupted: The Beginning of Wisdom
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: Books That Smile Back
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone
Books reviewed include The Orphanage of Gods by Helena Coggan, The True History of The Strange Brigade edited by David Thomas Moore, The Mortal Word by Geneveive Cogman, The Subjugate by Amanda Bridgeman, The Migration by Helen Marshall, Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill, Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, The Girl King by Mimi Yu, The Clockworm and Other Strange Stories by Karen Heuler

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe
Films reviewed include Happy Death Day 2U, Glass, Mary Poppins Returns, The Kid Who Would be King, Alita: Battle Angel, Bumblebee, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463554111

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 #280

MARCH–APRIL 2019

Publisher

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

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e: [e-mail]

f: TTAPress

t: @TTApress

shop: shop.ttapress.com

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

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© 2019 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 280 MARCH-APRIL 2019

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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INTERZONE’S 2019 COVER ARTIST IS RICHARD WAGNER

[e-mail] (email)

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL

SHAUNA O’MEARA

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FUTURE INTERRUPTED

ANDY HEDGECOCK

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CLIMBING STORIES

ALIYA WHITELEY

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ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

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CYBERSTAR

VAL NOLAN

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

[e-mail] (email)

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AND YOU SHALL SING TO ME A DEEPER SONG

MARIA HASKINS

story illustrated by Martin Hanford

www.deviantart.com/martinhanford1974

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CORIANDER FOR THE HIDDEN

NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

story

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EVERYTHING RISING, EVERYTHING STARTING AGAIN

SARAH BROOKS

story

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’SCAPES MADE DIAMOND

SHAUNA O’MEARA

novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

REVIEWS

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MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

films: Happy Death Day 2U, Glass, Mary Poppins Returns, The Kid Who Would be King, Alita: Battle Angel, Bumblebee, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

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BOOK ZONE

books: The Orphanage of Gods, The True History of the Strange Brigade, The Mortal Word, The Subjugate, The Migration, Zero Bomb, Shadow Captain, A Memory Called Empire, The Girl King, The Clockworm and Other Strange Stories

EDITORIAL

SHAUNA O’MEARA

’Scapes Made Diamond began in a veterinary clinic with an old cat who had reached the end of her days. The two men who brought her in thought the world of her and as I administered the medication to help her on her way, one cradled her and wept brokenly while the other, resting a comforting hand on his shoulder, stroked the cat’s grizzled nose and said, Fly free, my darling.

She was so sick that her passing was little more than a relaxing of her body; a sort of unfurling. Surrender. Surrounded by love.

That was the moment I teared up too.

There are few professions in which one is regularly exposed to death and mine is particularly unique in that, so often at the end, we are the ones helping creatures to pass in the presence of devastated people for whom that whiskered muzzle, that scaled tail, those bright eyes beside the breakfast table are just as much family as its human members. People often tell me how sad and heartbreaking they think veterinary medicine must be. Which at times it is; I won’t lie. What many wouldn’t expect, however, is the flipside of that pain and loss: the privilege vets have to bear witness to the raw, unguarded moments of love and connection that make us the complex and beautiful emotional creatures that we are.

Some of the most intimate and deeply human moments I have experienced have happened around the passing of a pet. People, sometimes complete strangers, embrace and cry. They take pains to ensure loved ones can be present to say goodbye. (One woman I met even helped her son to reconnect with his dying dog over Skype: he was on a naval ship and could not get back to Australia to be there for him.) They kiss and pat and hug every inch of their furred, feathered and scaled friends and whisper into their ears as they pass away: I love you. You have been my best good girl. You go and look after Grandma now.

As their doctor, I have at times been drawn into these circles of family members, entrusted with personal stories, in voices hushed and always fond, of what this pet has meant to them. Pets who have been their elderly owners’ last link to a lost child. Pets who have helped their human through such hard times they are credited with their very survival. Pets who are their person’s only friend.

Once they have passed, the family removes their pet’s collar reverently, they trim locks of hair to remember them by, and they present toys and blankets to be buried with them like pharaohs. In this aftermath, there is often relief mixed with sadness, and even a little humour. I had one young owner wrap his cat in a Jetstar blanket and through laughing tears bemoan that she wasn’t flying first-class.

My depiction of this side of the animal-human bond is not to romanticise or make light of death, of course. Death is all too often awful and undignified and unfair, for pets and people alike, and it is undeniably a terrifying step into the unknown. As Hamlet says, …in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

For me, one of the marvellous aspects of science fiction and fantasy is its ability to invoke the wondrous and the strange to illustrate truths that go to the core of our humanity. In writing ’Scapes Made Diamond, my goal was to depict the convergence of love and release experienced so often in my veterinary world that I might show one facet of death marked not by horror and dread, but by acceptance of its inevitability and, in this story’s case, the very human yearning for redemption and forgiveness. I hope I achieved some semblance of my aim.

Future Interrupted

ANDY HEDGECOCK

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THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

The influence of science on art and literature is subtle, indirect and filtered through human emotion, but it’s clear that major scientific discoveries seep into every aspect of our culture.

There are interesting ‘minor’ developments, resulting from technological shifts. For example, the camera enhanced expression for painters by freeing them from the function of recording the world. This enabled them to let their imaginations run free and encouraged experimentation with the abstraction of form and colour. But technology can sometimes impose constraints on culture rather than expanding its horizons: the challenge of contriving murder mysteries in the age of GPS and DNA analysis seem to have inspired the recent glut of crime novels with period settings.

But what about the far-reaching ontological changes? To what extent have the paradigm shifts realised by science altered our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe?

Consider the way in which the heliocentric model of the universe – set out in Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1543) – shattered the certainties of the medieval world. Under the geocentric model, advocated by Aristotle and Ptolemy, humanity’s sense of self-worth had been entrenched in the beliefs that the Earth was at the centre of creation and that humanity lived in plain sight of God. By demolishing this grand illusion, Copernicus forced us to contemplate the possibility that we are inconsequential creatures lost in the immensity of space and prompted a creeping sense of disempowerment among the late-medieval intelligentsia. This, in turn, fuelled a reassertion of humanity’s significance through a search for understanding – of ourselves, the natural world and the universe itself. The result was the cultural explosion known as the Renaissance, a period of rapid expansion of the arts in terms of theme, technique and engagement with human experience. Science, literature, painting, architecture and philosophy were all put in the service of this quest to re-establish humanity’s sense of meaning.

Science’s re-mapping of reality doesn’t always have such a direct or transparent impact on the arts and humanities. For example, Copernicus scholar Michał Kokowski points out that the ‘uncongenial’ heliocentric model of the universe led philosopher Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) and poet John Donne (1572–1631) to believe humanity no longer fitted safely into the earthly and supernatural realms. In the case of Boehme, a source of inspiration for Philip K. Dick’s VALIS books (1981), the response was a provocative, almost heretical form of visionary mysticism. Donne’s response was a body of grittily eloquent poetry that embraced love, the mystical experience and the paradoxes of nature and existence.

The ontological upheavals didn’t stop with the Renaissance, of course, and for the last 150 years some of the most unsettling findings have emerged from the various branches of psychology.

Sex crazed monkeys and ping-pong balls

The influence of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis is fading now, and its ideas are aggressively contested, but 120 years after it became part of a new intellectual movement it continues to be used as a form of therapy and a means of interpreting experience. Like Copernicus, Freud challenged humanity’s narcissistic belief in our own power and agency, but instead of movement across the vastness of the universe, he focussed on our unconscious drives. The human mind, he suggested, was a battleground in which the civilising influence of the ‘Superego’ struggled to control the animal appetites of the ‘Id’. Meanwhile, the sexual instinct, ‘Eros’, clashed with the death instinct, ‘Thanatos’. For Freud, free will was an illusion, our behaviour was determined by the clash of these competing forces and dreams were the key to understanding our unconscious conflicts. According to the psychologist Don Bannister (1966), psychoanalytic theories seemed to suggest that man is basically a battlefield. He is a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are forever engaged in mortal combat.

By the 1930s, psychoanalytic ideas were established in the mainstream and were having a significant impact on the arts – consider Dalí’s work on Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and the symbols at play in the work of Paul Delvaux, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington. And the period immediately World War II saw a spate of inner space sf. John Brunner’s Telepathist (1965) involves shared ‘catapathic’ fantasies, dream worlds in which people can be healed or become totally estranged from reality. Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers (1987) occupied similar territory but with the technological gloss of cyberpunk psychoanalysis; while Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor (1989) was a witty hardboiled fantasy involving floatation tanks, multiple layers of dreamscape and virtual encounters with characters from classic cinema.

If psychoanalysis dealt a hefty blow to humanity’s sense of self-importance, the more controlled and laboratory-based work that superseded it delivered a knockout. Psychologists such as John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner demonstrated that behaviour patterns could be altered through conditioning, the application of regimes of reward and punishment to people and animals. Don Bannister was as fond of Behaviourism as he was of psychoanalysis, suggesting it portrayed human beings as basically a ping-pong ball with a memory. The philosophy did, however, inform a number of classic works of fiction in the decades after World War II. The theme of behaviourally-mediated ‘brainwashing’ is central to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962).

The next movement to dominate psychology was cognitivism, which considered the brain as a system and saw people as ‘human information processors’. The key concerns of cognitive psychologists include the workings and failings of memory and the biases, desertions and errors that shape perception. A set of interests they shared with Philip K. Dick. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) – and the two Blade Runner movies the book inspired – characters’ memories are flawed or artificially implanted. Even the collective memory of the whole of society seems to be distorted. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson focusses on the fabricated nature of perception. The consciousness of characters is altered through drugs, sex and magical ritual. The beliefs of readers are nudged, shaken or destroyed by a fragmented and nonlinear narrative that reworks tropes from satire, sf, detective fiction and countercultural propaganda. Like Dick, Shea and Wilson felt mainstream sf and the traditional novel were no longer relevant to an audience increasingly aware of the provisional nature of their own apprehension of reality.

Eliminative materialism and the Great God Pan

What will provoke the next shift in our sense of ourselves and the way we represent the human condition in art and literature? Neuroscience seems a likely candidate. In Key Thinkers in Neuroscience (2019) Andrew Wickens reflects on 140 years of research and highlights huge leaps in our understanding of the brain’s structures, functions and interrelationships. And yet, he asserts: the facts are simple: we know very little … neuroscience is a very young discipline, which makes it an exciting one too.

Neuroscience has been inspiring storytellers since its earliest experiments and demonstrations. In The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) H.G. Wells describes the creation of quasi-human hybrid animals through a process of vivisection. In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), an experiment on the elicitation of spiritual experiences begins with minor brain surgery.

There has been a recent flood of books exploring the developing possibilities of neuroscience. For example, in John Scalzi’s Lock In (2014) a virus leaves people unable to control their bodies, but technologies are developed which allow them to interact with the world indirectly. Afterparty (2014) by Daryl Gregory, tackles schizophrenia, psychoactive drugs and the synthesis of quasi-religious experience. Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds (2014) is a near future adventure exploring the biochemical basis of memory and the ethical limits of science. The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016), by Emma Green, imagines the facilitation of transferable consciousness by a cross-species neurological interface.

Andrew Wickens sets out some fascinating possibilities for neuroscience: there is, he reveals, a philosophy known as ‘eliminative materialism’, which suggests the entirety of human experience will eventually be explained in terms of neurobiology. It’s an exciting but chilling possibility, and one which will inevitably inspire new directions in art, philosophy and, of course, sf.

CLIMBING STORIES

aliya whiteley

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BOOKS THAT SMILE BACK

Today I’ve bagged one of the small tables in the ever-busy cafe of the British Library. From my position I have an impressive view of the six-storey King’s Library Tower, the central glass cube that houses the collection of King George III.

These volumes form the core of the building, but I never can find a spot in which I can clearly see the individual titles on the spines. That frustrates me in the same way that I feel irrationally frustrated by people who read books in public and don’t hold the spine up in a visible position. When I’m sitting on a train and all I can see of a book is its reflection in the window, in the hands of the person sitting in front of me, I can’t help but spend the journey craning forward, trying to make out the words on the page.

Is this just nosiness? I like to think of it as a variation of the ancient art of people-watching. Lots of us surreptitiously suck up the ever-changing faces of the strangers we come across, and the details of the emotions found there. It’s difficult to be with a person in any circumstance and not, at least, steal a glance at