Interzone #289 (November-December 2020)

By TTA Press

Interzone's 2020 cover artist is Warwick Fraser-Coombe
Fiction:

Cryptozoology by Tim Lees
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Ephemeral Quality of Mersay by John Possidente
illustrated by Jim Burns

The Way of His Kind by James Sallis

Smoke Bomb by Matt Thompson
illustrated by Vincernt Sammy

There's a Gift Shop Now by Françoise Harvey

The Third Time I Saw a Fox by Cécile Cristofari

2019 James White Award Winner:
Limitations by David Maskill

Features:

Guest Editorial
Jim Burns

Future Interrupted: Cancelled Futures, Possible Worlds
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: A Farewell to Worms
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Duncan Lawie: World Engines Destroyer + World Engines Creator by Stephen Baxter • Stephen Theaker: Machine by Elizabeth Bear + The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem • Maureen Kincaid Speller: Mordew by Alex Pheby •Juliet E. McKenna: Divine Heretic by Jaime Lee Moyer + Hollow Empire by Sam Hawke • Jack Deighton: Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Bill & Ted Face the Music, Tenet, The New Mutants, Carmilla, Wolfwalkers, Possessor, Love You Forever, Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite!

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463450826

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 #289

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2020

Publisher

TTA Press

w: ttapress.com

e: [e-mail]

f: TTAPress

t: @TTApress

shop: shop.ttapress.com

Books and films for review are always welcome. Get in touch!

Editor

Andy Cox

[e-mail]

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

Events

Roy Gray

[e-mail]

© 2020 Interzone & contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system (tta.submittable.com/submit).

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INTERZONE 289 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2020

TTA PRESS

COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2020

PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

CONTENTS

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OUR 2020 COVER ARTIST IS WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE

warwickfrasercoombe.com

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL

JIM BURNS

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

ANDY HEDGECOCK

CLIMBING STORIES

ALIYA WHITELEY

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

FICTION

cryptozoology (2c).tif

CRYPTOZOOLOGY

TIM LEES

story illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Ephemeral Quality of Mersay resized.tif

THE EPHEMERAL QUALITY OF MERSAY

JOHN POSSIDENTE

story illustrated by Jim Burns

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THE WAY OF HIS KIND

JAMES SALLIS

story

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SMOKE BOMB

MATT THOMPSON

story illustrated by Vincent Sammy

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THERE’S A GIFT SHOP NOW

FRANÇOISE HARVEY

story

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THE THIRD TIME I SAW A FOX

CÉCILE CRISTOFARI

story

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2019 JAMES WHITE AWARD WINNER:

LIMITATIONS

DAVID MASKILL

REVIEWS

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BOOK ZONE

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MUTANT POPCORN

NICK LOWE

EDITORIAL

JIM BURNS

My dad was given to the occasional cock-eyed cliché, portentous declaration or skewed aphorism, and sometimes just plain silly remarks. One such remark he would direct at me was You know something James? You think too much. He claimed that I liked my own company, and certainly I allowed my imagination to take flight, letting my thoughts drift through landscapes of general weirdness. I think I might have mockingly apologised. Sorry Dad, I’ll try and think less.

But being largely lost in my own thoughts is how I spend a great deal of my time. Incarcerated alone for hours at a time in my studio lends itself to drifting thoughts of an often free-association variety. I can’t pretend to deep, philosophical musings or abstract contemplations, but I do think about the creative way forward and possible ‘artistic directions’.

For me the process of painting goes on automatically and my imagination can be anywhere really. We are passing through a strange ‘incarcerated’ time for sure but for me it’s pretty easy, as it was ever thus.

Recently a thing that has preoccupied me rather has been the subject of the ‘what ifs’ in life. Those roads not taken. Pointless speculations musing on the Alternate Histories of one’s lived and almost-lived lives. Sometimes when the piece of work to hand is fighting back – that damned tyranny of the blank canvas – the inevitable self-doubt starts to nag away at one’s conscience. Why am I doing this? But if I wasn’t doing this I’d be stymied. I have zero other skills. I keep reminding myself… That kid who read those comics back in the 50s and 60s, not having sufficient self-knowledge to see the way forward in life, got the wrong end of the stick and decided that rather than follow Frank Hampson’s example, followed that of his fictional hero instead. So there was a different road. I flew jets for a while – a life lived by a different version of me. Maybe in that multiverse of possibilities – if one subscribes to one of these paradoxical-seeming ideas of an infinity of timelines splitting off from each discrete particle of ‘time’ – Squadron Leader Burns did his thing. After all, I wasn’t that bad a pilot…and with some fractional tweaking of events maybe?

Dad would still say I think too much but that imagination has served me well enough. I turned again to Frank Hampson. He sent me down a wrong road once but I got back on track. On the easel behind me is a large canvas. It features a spacecraft rocketing towards the Martian surface, and I can see in the organic forms of the vessel the direct influence of that splendid fellow’s own imagination upon my own. I think the curving road, the junctions and cul de sacs are largely behind me now. The way ahead – what’s left of it – seems at last to be really quite straight!

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

ANDY HEDGECOCK

CANCELLED FUTURES, POSSIBLE WORLDS

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For David Graeber, who died on 2 September 2020, a massive loss to decency and critical thought.

Four decades ago, my teenage obsessions were the music of Joy Division, the cartoons of Steve Bell and the writing conjured from the experimental cauldron of New Worlds. My books and records were antidotes to tedium, conformity and authority: we were governed by a neoliberal clique determined to demolish industries and weaponise unemployment, but we had the consolation of a vibrant counterculture.

Forty years of neoliberal propaganda have taken their toll. The internet offers astonishing and innovative sounds, images and texts, but the mainstream is increasingly philistine and conformist. Work passed off as subversive is often a theme park re-enactment of the cultural conflicts of the last century. Corporate advertising is replete with warmed over surrealism, punk posturing and faux rebellion.

In Ghosts of My Life (2014) the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, aka K-Punk, argues there has been a slow cancellation of the future. Try this variant of a thought experiment proposed by Fisher: pick a piece of music released in the past two years, then imagine it being transported back in time to 2005 and being played on the radio. There would be no cognitive jolt. Now imagine taking a piece from 1990 and playing it to an audience in 1975. The music might well prove unrecognisable and provoke a feeling of dislocation because, in the late twentieth century, music lurched from one style to another with astounding rapidity. For example, in the period from 1967–77 we had psychedelia, folk-rock, prog, glam, disco, metal and punk. But from the 1980s onwards the music industry began to recycle its own creations, looting from past decades and reproducing their sounds in an enhanced, more polished form. Even rap, an exciting departure in the early 1980s, went on to repeatedly rehash its core ideas for three decades – and counting.

And it’s not just music. Our era offers creative ‘products’ in a myriad of forms and in countless styles, as long as your chosen item is a pastiche of something well-worn and popular. The issue is not that we are stuck in the past; that would be less alarming than our actual predicament. L.P. Hartley may have been right to assert that the past is a different country, where they do things differently, but an exploration of our cultural history can provide entertainment and illumination. The problem, according to Fisher, is that we are trapped in a perpetual present, with deflated expectations. We have a sense of living after the gold rush and lacking the tools to create a meaningful future. We are, he asserted, in the grip of a formal nostalgia and in thrall to the recombinatoral delirium of remix culture, a phenomenon that creates the illusion that we have access to the new. He describes the sense of exhaustion experienced by both artists and audiences as the slow cancellation of the future.

Fisher suggests our culture faces a predicament similar that set out in the closing scenes of early 1980s sf series Sapphire and Steel. The eponymous temporal agents are ensnared in an abandoned roadside café, where strands of past time are intertwined, and their complacency dooms them to spend eternity in a timeless void.

It’s easy to see how we got here. Factors such as the shortage of social housing, higher rent, zero hours contracts and employers’ demands for unpaid overtime have reduced the time and energy available for creative work. The tendency to see innovation, craft and imagination as luxuries that compromise economic wellbeing is not new. Interviewed in his declining years, the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (director of If…. and O! Lucky Man) warned of the death of critical cinema: The middle-class filmmaker doesn’t want to upset the applecart. Television breeds this terrible conformist mentality where people are delighted to conform to the conditions to get on, in order be quite well paid and have the privileged life of a television worker.

The director Martin Scorsese knows all too well where this economically induced timidity has led. Alarmed at the dominance of superhero movies in Hollywood, he told the Guardian: They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, re-vetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

Similarly, Alan Moore has attributed the popularity of superhero films to the desire of adults to cling to their relatively reassuring childhoods rather than deal with the realities of the twenty-first century. It is, he suggested, a kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest.

Technology is another factor in this crisis of creativity. Musicians such as Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Bill Nelson have been using it to accelerate change and create new musical forms for decades, but the main impact of digital equipment has been to improve sound quality and facilitate reproduction and distribution on demand. This is often to the financial detriment of the artists concerned. This additional increased pressure on musicians – and it also affects writers and filmmakers – further distorts creative activity in the direction of the safe and familiar.

Artists and audiences explore established forms and styles, not to understand our history, or to illuminate the present, but because of a conscious drive to reproduce the recognisable. This results in art that reassures, guarantees an income, and perpetuates the social conditions leading to exploitation and social control. The outcome of forty years in which art has become increasingly commodified, is the loss of contact with the real, the sacrifice of our ability to transcend our current conditions and the atrophy of our ability to shape the future.

The lowering of cultural expectations was of particular concern to the late anthropologist David Graeber. Depressed by the vast investment of talent and money in the simulated wonders of the increasingly enfeebled Star Wars franchise, and disappointed by the cancelled tomorrows of Martian colonies, tractor beams and force fields, Graeber knew the value of imagination. He wrote: This is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs – to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imagination once again become a material force in human history.

Hope lies with idiosyncratic creators who ignore notions of genre and refuse to be constrained by tradition or the expectations of their admirers. M. John Harrison (interviewed in issue #288) has ploughed a unique furrow of bleak humour, strange quests and ambiguous comprehension for fifty-four years. In a recent Comma Press podcast on sf&f and landscape (Series 2, Episode 5: commapress.co.uk/digital/the-comma-press-podcast/) Harrison railed against Hollywood formalism and those forms of narratology that burn everything out of story that isn’t plot or narrative structure.

There is, he suggested, a belief we can make a proper story again and again and again, as if it were an assembly line – I want to see stories in which the rules are constantly broken and closure is not provided.

If there is one thing Harrison is more suspicious of than closure it is ideas. I absolutely hate the concept of writing from ideas, it seems so limiting. You don’t want ideas, you want images. I tend to start with bits and pieces I have already observed. The job of the writer, he suggests, is to invent a genuinely personal phenomenology and give the reader the space to authenticate it.

There are artists each of us cherish for their unique and specific visions. For me there are musicians such as Dead Can Dance, Sharron Kraus and Bill Nelson (still pushing boundaries after all these years); a roster of filmmakers that includes Péter Lichter (search him out on YouTube), Adam Scovell and The Bird and the Monkey; and writers of idiosyncratic fiction such as Nina Allan, Priya Sharma, Tim Lees, Val Nolan, Sarah Schofield and Malcolm Devlin. There are plenty of imaginations to inspire us, so let’s not spend eternity in the timeless void.

CLIMBING STORIES

ALIYA WHITELEY

A FAREWELL TO WORMS

There are slow worms living in my compost bin. Five of them. I lifted the lid one afternoon in early summer and found them there, lethargic in their warm tangle of weeds. One moved a little, just enough for me to be sure they were alive and aware of me. I took a photo, feeling (as I always do) that photos don’t capture a moment while also, somehow, taking much of that moment away. But still, I took the photo.

I am trying not to trespass but I can’t resist their gleam. They amaze me. The largest is fat, bronze, and looks heavy. The others are greener, thinner, like ribbon beside rope. I looked them up online, of course – another form of diminishment and capture of the experience. They are legless lizards, not blind but often thought of as such. They have eyes, and eyelids. They blink. Copenhagen Zoo kept one in captivity for fifty-four years. When they mate, the male bites the head of the female and holds her strongly in his grip for as long as ten hours. She will bear the scars of previous couplings for the rest of her life.

I keep returning to them, and to the stillness they press upon me. They barely move, and I am also static in their company. They create a moment outside of life.

One day that moment will be gone.

I’ll lift the lid and they won’t be there anymore. At least, I assume that’s how this whole human/slow