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    Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Ebook222 pages2 hours

    Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The November-December issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by Gary Gibson, Julie C. Day, Greg Kurzawa, Rich Larson, Malcolm Devlin, and Ken Altabef. The 2015 cover artist is Martin Hanford, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Ben Baldwin, and Vince Haig. Features: We All Need Diverse Books by Maureen Kincaid Speller; Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews); Laser Fodder by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, including Jack Deighton on Cixin Liu, and Ian Sales on David Mitchell); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment).

    Fiction this issue
    Five Conversations With My Daughter (Who Travels In Time) by Malcolm Devlin
    We Might Be Sims by Rich Larson
    Heartsick by Greg Kurzawa
    Florida Miracles by Julie C. Day
    Scienceville by Gary Gibson
    Laika by Ken Altabef

    Artists this issue
    Martin Hanford
    Richard Wagner
    Ben Baldwin
    Vince Haig

    Books reviewed this issue
    Book Zone, edited by Jim Steel, has: The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, The Bone Clocks and Slade House by David Mitchell, The House Of Shattered Wings by Aliette De Bodard, Sherlock Holmes: The Thinking Engine by James Lovegrove, If Then by Matthew De Abaitua, Luna: New Moon by Ian Mcdonald, The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, Heart Of The Original by Steve Aylett, Stories For Chip: A Tribute To Samuel R. Delany edited By Nisi Shawl & Bill Campbell.

    Reviewers; Jack Deighton, Ian Sales, Jim Steel, Paul Kincaid, Stephen Theaker, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Ian Hunter, Andy Hedgecock

    Nick Lowe's Mutant Popcorn movie reviews this issue include: The Martian, The Last Witch Hunter, Hitman: Agent 47, The Boy And The Beast, Pan, Hotel Transylvania 2, The Lobster, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, Crimson Peak, The Brand New Testament

    Tony Lee's Laser Fodder, TV/DVD, reviews this issue include: The Dance Of Reality, The Flash Season One, Arrow Season Three, Iceman, Infini, Mad Max: Fury Road, Turbo Kid, Dark Matter Season One, Haven Season Five, Metal Hurlant Resurgence, Terminator Genisys, Technotise: Edit & I, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, Eyes Without A Face, Seconds, Tour Of Duty, Elimination Game, Alien Strain, Song Of The Sea, Downtime

    Other non-fiction this issue
    We All Need Diverse Books - Maureen Kincaid Speller
    Future Interrupted - Jonathan McCalmont - Harder-Core-Than-Thou
    Time Pieces - Nina Allan - Doctor Change Or Doctor Die
    Ansible Link David Langford

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateNov 19, 2015
    ISBN9781311373816
    Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      Interzone #261 (Nov-Dec 2015) - TTA Press

      JONATHAN McCALMONT’S FUTURE INTERRUPTED

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      Harder-Core-Than-Thou

      ‘Core Science Fiction’ is one of the most contentious terms in contemporary science fiction. Often deployed by reviewers and publicists in quite an unthinking manner, the term is associated with a strain of science fiction that echoes the style and subject matter of stories first published in pulp magazines during the so-called Golden Age of science fiction. In order to understand why ‘Core SF’ is a contested term, it is first necessary to understand how the discourse surrounding genre fiction periodically changes in an effort to reflect emerging commercial realities.

      When the market for pulp magazines collapsed at the end of the 1950s, the science fiction field abandoned its association with popular science magazines in favour of an association with literary fiction. However, in order to appeal to the types of people who read and edited literary fiction, genre authors were forced to change both the style and format of the stories they produced. Some writers struggled to adapt and so disappeared from the field completely but the economic and aesthetic changes caused by the re-positioning of science fiction’s economic heartland meant that the field also began attracting authors whose work would never have been a good fit for magazines aimed at amateur radio enthusiasts.

      In hindsight, the differences between pre- and post-collapse science fiction are so pronounced that it would almost make sense to talk about the stories published in pulp magazines as having been part of a completely different genre to those produced by literary publishers. However, the presence of certain individuals and institutions in both contexts means that it does make sense to talk about genre culture as a single evolving entity rather than a series of much shorter-lived scenes. Genre culture did not so much die as evolve thanks to a collection of authors, critics, and anthologists who presented the changes in genre literature not as a product of economics but as the natural and desirable result of science fiction having progressed and become more sophisticated.

      While genre culture likes to remember its brief flirtations with literary respectability, the truth is that the genre’s off-again, on-again relationship with literary fiction has proved just as economically unstable as its earlier association with popular science. The economic heartland of the genre shifts every few years and what genre culture calls ‘progress’ is really little more than the unending and undignified evolutionary scramble to keep making sales even as old markets collapse and reform.

      For example, it was probably not until the 1980s that the people running genre imprints began to realise that the market for fantasy was considerably larger than the market for science fiction. The emergence of Dungeons & Dragons novels as international best-sellers seemed to take genre publishers completely by surprise but the discovery of an enormous market for fat fantasy changed the economics of the genre and resulted in science fiction novels getting progressively longer as complex plots and detailed world-building came to be seen as more important than psychological complexity or stylistic innovation. By the beginning of the 21st Century, science fiction’s economic heartland had moved so close to that of epic fantasy that critics began to talk of ‘evaporating genres’ as a way of describing the use of science-fictional tropes and techniques in novels which, like China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, were almost indistinguishable from those marketed as epic fantasy. It is no accident that while the New Weird may have begun when the British literary mainstream (re)discovered the existence of the British science fiction scene, the movement was later re-imagined as a blending of conventional genres by American authors and anthologists who simply could not see beyond the impulse to justify collapsing three very different literary traditions into one enormous market for commercial fantasy.

      A similar shift is now underway as the market for epic fantasy is shrinking almost as fast as the markets for young adult and children’s literatures continue to expand. As with the shifts towards literary fiction and epic fantasy, the current rapprochement with YA is driven by a shift in the market that is accompanied by both a re-ordering of aesthetic ideals and changes in the discourse. Just as the New Wave justified itself in terms of the genre naturally becoming more sophisticated, many of today’s authors, critics and anthologists present themselves as inheritors of a future in which science fiction is naturally more inclusive and diverse.

      Genre culture likes to think of itself as progressive and so every shift in the market is processed and internalised using rhetoric that champions the new and revolutionary at the expense of the old and reactionary. This dialectic is common to most cultural ecosystems and every time the new wins out over the old it creates a crisis of legitimacy in which the benefits of the new are weighed against the cost of abandoning the old. Unlike other cultural ecosystems where the old and the new are often presented as antithetical, genre culture has grown quite adept at reconciling the old and the new meaning that the old rhetorics of conceptual novelty and literary sophistication often sit quite comfortably beside the new rhetorics of genre-transgression and diversity, but the fact that these aesthetics are not seen as being in direct conflict does not mean that legitimacy is no longer an issue.

      ‘Core Science Fiction’ is a deeply problematic concept as it suggests that some forms of literature are central to science fiction while others are more peripheral. When people point to recent works like Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and declare them to be works of ‘Core SF’, they are effectively suggesting that works that could have been published thirty years ago under the auspices of science fiction are somehow more legitimate than works like The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne, which might not have been identified as SF were it not for a generalised culture of hipness about genre boundaries.

      Given genre culture’s fondness for re-inventing itself, I completely understand people who feel that their sub-culture has slipped away from them… As someone who was drawn to literary SF by the short fiction of Stephen Baxter and Greg Egan, I’m not sure how this is supposed to translate into a willingness to engage with the aspirational narratives of novels like Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor or most of the stuff published under the rubric of Young Adult fiction. I understand the urge to throw up boundaries and explain how ‘that stuff’ is different to ‘this stuff’ but personal preferences are not objective and attempts to bolster your preferences through appeals to legitimacy and purity tap into a set of cultural energies that can turn very ugly very quickly.

      Few things take a moral edge better than the rhetoric of aesthetic purity. It doesn’t take much to move from expressing frustration with the current state of your chosen cultural scene to arguing that things used to be objectively better and from there it is nothing but a hop, skip and a jump to the conclusion that the best way to improve things is to purify the scene by kicking out all of the interlopers, carpet-baggers, and wrong-heads. Peruse the proclamations issued by the Hugo ballot-stuffing Sad Puppies and you will see a defensible call to celebrate unfashionable story forms getting lost amidst calls for purification based upon age, race, gender, sexuality, and politics. As with Gamer Gate or any other moral crusade you care to mention, calls for purity inevitably attract people who are more interested in the act of purification than the thing they claim to be purifying, and so the crusades stop being about corrupt games journalism or the lack of space opera on the Hugo ballot and transform into something much darker and uglier.

      I don’t think that ‘Core SF’ is inherently racist, sexist, or homophobic but using the rhetoric of cultural purity to help sell certain types of book legitimises the use of that rhetoric elsewhere and perpetuates the myth that some voices are superior simply by virtue of having been around for longer. ‘Science Fiction’ is a term with no fixed meaning and it will continue to re-invent itself as it always has. Read what you want by all means but tradition and legitimacy are terrible standpoints from which to defend anything, let alone a future-facing literature like science fiction.

      NINA ALLAN’S TIME PIECES

      Nina-Allan.tif

      Doctor Change or Doctor Die

      It’s hardly a secret that the novelist A.L. Kennedy is a Doctor Who fan. She’s spoken about her lifelong love of the programme on multiple occasions, she’s referenced it in her fiction, and this year sees the fulfilment of her long-held wish to write something set in the Whoniverse with the publication of her Doctor Who tie-in novel The Drosten’s Curse. In a literary landscape of nervous agents and terrified publishers, where no risk can be taken and the next novel should be like the last novel that did well, or a mash-up of two that did quite well, or a version of a version of something that had solid sales in 2010, literate sci-fi may be the only arena where the wild, surprising and wonderful can hide, Kennedy wrote on the Guardian Books blog earlier this summer. For me, like many other people, the Doctor was the beginning of thinking outside the standard boxes provided. As with all good sci-fi, the Who stories allow us to view our world and our habits and our species in an anthropological manner.

      This is exactly the kind of open and inclusive attitude I have come to expect from Kennedy, who I admire as one of the UK’s most original and outspoken writers. Which is what made it all the more disappointing and surprising to learn of the view she expressed at this year’s Edinburgh Festival: that Doctor Who should never be played by a woman.

      As a heterosexual woman, I have no interest in a female Doctor. He’s kind of got a guy vibe, the Doctor. A hopeless, undomestic, dozy, dreamy guy-type of eccentricity. It’s not a girl-type of eccentricity. I’d be surprised if he changed gender, Kennedy added. I’d be the last person to demand that Kennedy be shot down in flames for saying something so silly – people being shot down in flames is increasingly a cause for concern within science fiction these days, and the last thing we need is more of it – and it’s good to remember that these were words spoken in response to an off-the-cuff question at a book festival, not a considered essay setting out the author’s worldview from here to eternity. What she said did set me thinking, though. It’s clear that Kennedy was speaking from a place of nostalgia – the description of the Doctor as having a guy vibe has, I suspect, far more to do with her own memories of watching the show in the seventies and eighties than with any inherent prejudice towards what constitutes girl-type eccentricity as opposed to undomestic dreamy guy-type eccentricity. (Oh dear…)

      Kennedy has rightly identified Doctor Who as providing a place of safety for people who as children felt small and powerless and undefended. For Kennedy as for many of us, the show is culturally and even politically important. For her to then apply such an arbitrary, closed-minded and exclusionary prescription to Who seems to directly contradict her own more constructive, progressive understanding of what science fiction is actually for.

      Sadly, Kennedy is not alone in allowing childhood memories to dictate the shape of adult reality. I was pretty much flabbergasted when a colleague and friend of mine, chatting to me at a convention around the end of the Matt Smith era, stated in the strongest terms that the choice of a woman Doctor for any future incarnation would be an outrage. I honestly thought they were winding me up (unsurprisingly I have friends who try to do this) and it came as a genuine shock to my system when I realised they were serious: in this friend’s eyes, the idea of the Doctor being anything other than a heterosexual white guy was pretty much taboo. It would ruin the programme, they said. It wouldn’t be Doctor Who any more.

      It would be easy to wave these questions aside as unimportant. It’s just a TV show, after all, and a kids’ TV show at that. Which is precisely why it matters, of course. Millions of people worldwide watch Doctor Who. For many younger viewers the programme is, as Kennedy correctly identified, a place of safety, a refuge where hopes, dreams and fears are actualised and grappled with. Stories are important, stories are vital. Is it not equally vital that such wildly popular, widely disseminated stories as Doctor Who reflect equally the voices, faces, and predicaments of those who place their trust in them?

      Even if we look at Doctor Who purely from its own (admittedly very shaky) science fictional standpoint, to maintain that the Doctor somehow has to be some hyper-bumbling British bloke in Marks & Spencer’s underwear is patently ridiculous. According to the show’s firmly-established mythos, Doctor Who is an alien. Doctor Who is centuries old, a being from a planet called Gallifrey who can regenerate into a new bodily form in order to prolong their life as and when convenient or necessary. Is there some mysterious pre-set menu of regeneration options we’ve not been told about? Must be Caucasian, must have a sense of humour moulded by unrelenting childhood exposure to The Goodies and other supposedly iconic media manifestations of the 1970s, must have penis?

      I don’t think so. For a trans-dimensional being like the Doctor, such arbitrary restrictions on their freedom of bodily expression would surely be not only baffling but belittling?

      There’s also a wider point to be made here, about the possibilities and permutations of science fiction in general. If SF had a job description, surely it would be to make people sit up and take notice, to propel its audience out of complacency and towards new ideas? To be something that has, in A.L. Kennedy’s words, a jolt of risk and life about it? On the question of gender identity, the current widely-held default assumption is that gender is fixed, binary and biologically determined. Yet this is an assumption only, built up and reinforced through centuries of subtle and not-so-subtle societal pressures and micro-oppressions. If it is at least partly the job of literature to challenge such assumptions, then surely science fiction should be in the vanguard of that vanguard?

      My first encounters with ideas about gender fluidity came through science fiction. I have very clear memories of reading, as a young teenager, John Varley’s Eight Worlds story ‘Options’, in which an overworked mother of three living on a lunar colony decides to avail herself of the latest body-modification technology and spend some time as a man. Her personal journey from being Cleo through living as Leo to becoming Nile made a strong impression, and I reread the story on more than one occasion, trying to work out what I thought about it and naturally asking myself the question: if such a technology were really available, would I use it?

      In the light of current gender politics and transexuality, Varley’s stories can seem oversimplified, quick fixes – yet they remain interesting and important, not so much for how they tried to express themselves but for the fact that they expressed themselves at all.

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