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    Interzone #263 (Mar-Apr 2016)
    Interzone #263 (Mar-Apr 2016)
    Interzone #263 (Mar-Apr 2016)
    Ebook230 pages3 hours

    Interzone #263 (Mar-Apr 2016)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The March–April 2016 issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new novelettes and stories by Alexander Marsh Freed, Christopher Fowler, Michelle Ann King, Jeffrey Thomas, Rich Larson, and E. Catherine Tobler. The cover artist is Vincent Sammy, and Jim Burns, Richard Wagner, and Martin Hanford provide interior colour illustrations. Features: Comment from Jonathan McCalmont, Future Interrupted, and Nina Allan, Time Pieces; 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); Shattering Illusions in SFF by Juliet E. McKenna.

    Fiction this issue
    'Ten Confessions of Blue Mercury Addicts, by Anna Spencer' by Alexander Marsh Freed
    'Spine' by Christopher Fowler
    'Not Recommended For Guests Of A Philosophically Uncertain Disposition' by Michelle Ann King
    'Motherboard' by Jeffrey Thomas
    'Lotto' by Rich Larson
    'Andromeda of the Skies' by E. Catherine Tobler

    Artists this issue
    Vincent Sammy
    Jim Burns
    Martin Hanford
    Richard Wagner

    Books reviewed this issue
    Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, The Guns of Ivrea by Clifford Beal, Sockpuppet by Matthew Blakstad, The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts, Afro SF Volume 2 edited by Ivor W. Hartmann, Down Station by Simon Morden, Maresi by Maria Turschaninoff, All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, The Stars Seem So Far Away by Margrét Helgadóttir

    Nick Lowe's Mutant Popcorn movie reviews this issue include:
    Deadpool, Lazer Team, One and Two, The 5th Wave, Goosebumps, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Capture the Flag, The Survivalist, The Mermaid

    Tony Lee's Laser Fodder, TV/DVD, reviews this issue include:
    Air, Lost Girl Season Five, A Touch of Zen, Falling Skies Season Five, Pan, The Scopia Effect, Frankenstein, Last Stop, The Last Witch Hunter, The City of Lost Children, Game of Thrones Season Five, Doomwatch, From Other Worlds, Alienate, The Visit: An Alien Encounter

    Other non-fiction this issue
    Juliet E. McKenna – Editorial - Shattering Illusions in SFF
    Nina Allan - Time Pieces column - Setting Off For The Mountains
    Jonathan McCalmont - Future Interrupted column - The Hospitality of Bafflement
    David Langford - Ansible Link
    Book Reviewers - Jo Lindsay Walton, Duncan Lunan, Shaun Green, Ian Hunter, Jim Steel, Juliet E. McKenna, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Barbara Melville

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateMar 17, 2016
    ISBN9781310442537
    Interzone #263 (Mar-Apr 2016)
    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 #263 (Mar-Apr 2016) - TTA Press

      SHATTERING ILLUSIONS IN SFF

      JULIET E. McKENNA

      Let’s talk about illusions and perspective. In particular, optical illusions. Specifically, those pictures which are quite clearly one thing, right up until someone shows you that it can be something else. The Science Fiction Foundation logo is an example. The most famous is a glamorous woman with her head turned away – until you see it’s an old crone. And once you’ve seen that crone, you cannot unsee her. But the glamorous woman doesn’t vanish. She’s still there as well. You can see her any time you want.

      This can be a useful analogy for the shifts in perspective currently underway in our genre. Science Fiction and Fantasy books are what they have always been; outward looking stories exploring societal, philosophical and political questions in the context of imagined futures and other worlds, as authors devise parallel and alternate realities to explore the infinite possibilities of humanity’s relationships with technologies and each other. All woven into immersive, exciting tales.

      We’ve become used to seeing such narratives portrayed in a range of familiar styles. What’s changing is we now have diverse and equally talented voices showing us new and expanded perspectives on those same ideas, by way of unfamiliar and unexpected depictions. Ever more fine writing is informed by a broader range of experience, in terms of gender, sexuality, cultural heritage, race, disability etc, to the majority who have historically dominated.

      Though to be clear, diverse stories have always been with us. What’s new is greater awareness and growing insistence that these voices be heard. That those who helped build our genre historically are given their due, and those writing today are welcomed and encouraged to enrich and advance SF&F. If this was an optical illusion, let’s imagine we’ve realised a picture of a spaceship can suddenly become a glamorous sorceress! But the spaceship isn’t eradicated. You can still see it any time you wish. Plus you can enjoy seeing something else as well.

      So far so good, but we still need one more vital shift in perspective. Review coverage, promotion through social media, recommendations, citations and award nominations, anthology selections and more besides, remain stubbornly skewed in favour of white male writers. They get roughly two-thirds of the publicity that’s so vital for word-of-mouth popularity which sustains a writer’s career. Everyone else gets to share the third that remains.

      Yet appeals for action to correct this imbalance are seen as unreasonable demands for priority treatment from special interest groups. Now that’s a complete illusion. This call is actually asking for an end to disproportionate advantage persistently bestowed on one specific group. When the majority of white male writers working today never sought such favouritism, and who find the dead hand of cultural inertia and institutional racism/sexism as problematic as anyone else. Not least for themselves. Surely every honest writer wants their work to be judged on its true merits, on a level playing field?

      Working together to accelerate this change in perspective will benefit us all. Let’s make it so.

      Jonathan McCalmont’s Future Interrupted

      JM2.tif

      The Hospitality of Bafflement

      Lisa L. Hannett’s long-form debut Lament for the Afterlife recalls Nina Allan’s The Race in so far as it is neither a conventional novel nor a conventional short story collection: Unlike a short story collection, the individual sections make a lot less sense when removed from the context provided by the rest of the book. Unlike a novel, there is no unifying plot and the sense of continuity provided by character and setting is tenuous to say the least.

      The links between the book’s chapters feel unstable because Lament for the Afterlife contains almost no conventional exposition. Rather than telling us about people, places, and events, Hannett invites us to construct these things from the detritus of subjective experience as provided in paragraphs like this:

      Peyt’s legs twitch, left right left right, and he’s got a desperate urge to piss. He’s seen the kind of questioning Cap’s talking about. Back at camp, with some twelve-year-old runner they accused of squealing. Peyt carried the kid’s body away on his stretcher. I’m no Whitey. I can’t read this fucking guy’s mind. Never could. Dake? Dake? Dake? Dake? Dake? Dake?

      What is happening here is that Hannett has positioned her authorial camera so close to the characters’ streams of consciousness that their thoughts and feelings blot out the people and places that inspired them in the first place. Trapped within the event horizon of the characters’ emotional maelstrom, everything we learn about the world of the novel comes from its reflection in streams of consciousness and pages of barely-contextualised dialogue.

      The book lacks the unifying effects of narrative and character because of the difficulty involved in extracting these things from the literary equivalent of raw sense data. We may know for a fact that someone is feeling scared or happy, but we can never be sure whether the people and events provoking these reactions are the same as in previous chapters. Certain names and terms may recur but Hannett not only works to destabilise the meanings of words, but also explores particular events from sometimes radically different perspectives. A few hundred pages of this and you cannot help but become aware of how much you take for granted every time you form an opinion. Reading Lament for the Afterlife may be an almost singularly difficult experience, but it is also immensely thought-provoking.

      By making us work for basic elements such as character and internal chronology, Hannett is encouraging us not only to think about the artificiality of conventional narratives but also the tenuous nature of our own identities. Do we experience a coherent self or a stream of emotions and thoughts, which are then stitched together into something that resembles a character from a novel? Lament for the Afterlife is part of a literary tradition that questions the intellectual underpinnings of the conventional novel except that Hannett’s book goes much further than conventional anti-novels.

      Works like Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie critique the conventional novel by stressing the fallibility of experience and the tenuousness of human identities. However, because the anti-novel is a reaction to traditional novels, it shares mainstream literary culture’s commitment to the real world. This means that while the anti-novel may chronicle streams of consciousness and feature loads of sentence fragments placed out of chronological order, the currents of subjectivity all flow towards the oceanic depths of a world that is both fixed and comprehensible. Lament for the Afterlife does not share this commitment to the idea of a world independent of experience.

      Hannett’s book is set in a world that appears to have been devastated by centuries of total warfare pitting the human race against a people known only as the greys. Somewhere along the way, humanity appears to have acquired a mutation that causes its innermost thoughts to become physically manifest in a cloud around the owner’s head. Touching the manifested thoughts causes the thoughts themselves to be changed and so the boundary between interior psychology and external physicality is rendered virtually non-existent. Hannett further explores the blurring of thought and world by pointing out that, while people continue to fight and die, nobody has actually seen or spoken to a grey in living memory. In fact, Hannett even goes so far as to suggest that the greys might be little more than a figment of humanity’s overactive imagination. However, given that this is a world built with genre tools and contained within a book published by a genre imprint, we must question where fallible human perspectives end and unstable metaphysics begin. For example, it is all very well saying that the greys might be the product of human fears but this is a world in which thoughts are physically manifest meaning that the greys could both be real and a product of humanity’s constantly-evolving fears. As Nick Harkaway suggested in The Gone Away World, the boundary between truth and fiction tends not to stick around once you do away with the distinction between thought and reality.

      Lament for the Afterlife is a terrifyingly difficult book that takes no prisoners and makes no concessions to accessibility in the form of familiar genre tropes, gripping narratives, or strong characters with whom to empathise. This is high literary art as a towering rock face and the only finger-holds available to readers are those they are able to carve for themselves…and therein resides the problem with this sort of book.

      Survey the history of experimental writing and you will find that deconstructive cleverness has always been linked with the belief that formal innovation would serve to open up emotional and intellectual vistas that had been blocked off by the formal conservatism of the modern novel: When Anne Garréta’s Sphinx recounts a love story without gender-specific pronouns, it is out of a desire to explore a romance shorn of all gender dynamics. When Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves moves between stilted academic writing and typographic collage, it is out of a desire to show the limited and fragmentary nature of human comprehension and how cognition can both move us closer to understanding, and divorce us from reality. While experimental fiction can actively mess with form, structure, style and typography, it needs to find a way of connecting with readers or it runs the risk of feeling like an academic exercise. For all its references to war, fear, loss, and forgetting, the intellectual core of Lament for the Afterlife is a feeling of profound bafflement.

      Reading this book is like being asked to solve a cryptic crossword puzzle using clues extracted from a plate of alphabet pasta: It’s brilliantly clever and nobody has ever done it before, but only people with very specific tastes are going to want to spend their time wading through a book that is even less comprehensible and forgiving than the world itself. Lament for the Afterlife reads like an intellectual exercise aimed at people who are already in the business of writing; ambitious stylists will tear the book apart, extract all of its technical brilliance, and channel that cleverness into communicating ideas and emotions that are more compelling and hospitable than bafflement. For all its intellectual power, this is a book that feels destined to provoke passionate debates in hundreds of seminars and shrugs of bemusement everywhere else…and that’s actually kind of okay.

      One of the things that experimental work can do is force audiences into fresh relationships with an artistic form. Just as the impressionist painters made us realise that humans see reflected light rather than objects and early literary modernists reminded us that we glimpse the world through a thicket of subjective impressions, writers like Hannett draw our attention to the fact that we still expect our novels to feature characters, coherent worlds and profound meanings that surrender themselves to our interpretative skills. What are demands for profundity if not an echo of the much-derided requests for likeable characters? Where are the strong themes to which we can relate?!

      Not everyone reads for the same reason and not everyone relates to books in the same way. Lisa L. Hannett’s debut work of mosaic fiction is a book for people who want to be aware of the broken bones that lie beneath the skin of narrative.

      NINA ALLAN’S TIME PIECES

      Nina-Allan.tif

      Setting Off For the Mountains

      One of the first television ‘events’ of 2016 was the broadcasting of Andrew Davies’s serial adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s monumental epic War and Peace. Davies is only the most recent in a long line of scriptwriters to grapple with this behemoth, but his take on it was always going to arouse comment and perhaps controversy. Pride and Prejudice is one thing, but Tolstoy? For reasons of scale and cost alone the project seemed noteworthy. The BBC War and Peace also sparked a round of discussion, both online and off, about who had read the novel (and how long it had taken them), whether you had to have read the novel to know what the hell was going on in the TV series and, somewhat more interestingly, whether so-called classics like War and Peace still comprise a valuable and necessary part of a reader’s experience. Or a writer’s, come to that. Much noise was made.

      For the record, yes, I have read War and Peace. It took me five days, but I was a faster reader then, plus I did practically nothing else for the whole of that week. This happened sometime during the summer between my ‘A’ Levels and starting university, when I was sunk in Russian literature up to my neck. Reading War and Peace, for me, was a devastating, seminal and completely immersive experience, although War and Peace is not the novel I would recommend to anyone wanting to give Tolstoy a go – that would unequivocally be Anna Karenina – nor is it the Russian classic that I would deem ‘a must’ for understanding what nineteenth-century Russian literature is fundamentally ‘about’ – that would be something by Dostoevsky, most likely Crime and Punishment or The Idiot. Also for the record, I think Andrew Davies has made a pretty good fist of an impossible task. With just a short six hours to play with, he has not only covered the main events of War and Peace, he has also managed to capture something of the novel’s spirit. I cannot imagine a better Pierre Bezhukhov, for example, than Paul Dano, and even if Lily James isn’t quite Natasha as I imagined her, she has at least an element of her mercurial zest for life. What has surprised me most about revisiting War and Peace now, thirty years after I first read it, is how fundamentally my feelings about both its characters and its central events have altered. I once saw Andrei as a hero-philosopher. Now I’m thinking more chauvinist pig. Pierre is the hero, of course, just as Tolstoy intended, damn him.

      What has provoked me most about this whole War and Peace debate though is the online furore that erupted over a YouGov poll published in January, listing twenty-five classic works of literature together with the approximate percentage of Britons who say they’ve read them, and the percentage who say they’d like to read them, had they the time and the patience. There were more than a few writers who came out against the poll, not so much the works listed as the idea that classics inevitably make such onerous demands on readers that they – readers, I mean – will be put off reading them. Or that there should be a canon of ‘classic’ works anyway.

      One of the most vociferous challengers of the time and patience theory was SF’s own James Smythe, whose Twitter mini-rant made it over into The Guardian. Saying that patience is needed to read these books both demeans the books, and suggests that you’re not mentally able to read them, Smythe asserted. Here’s a novel thought: stop acting like a book is a mountain. Start acting like they’re a thing people read for fun, in their spare time.

      I admire Mr Smythe’s writing tremendously, but I could hardly disagree more with his sentiments here. To argue that all books are fundamentally the same – which is what Smythe is doing – is not only incorrect, it is actually more demeaning, of both books and readers, than to suggest that some books do require more effort to assimilate or even just to get through than others. Reading War and Peace is likely to offer a different kind of experience from reading The Hunger Games, or Murder at the Vicarage, or even Cloud Atlas. To say these experiences are different does not automatically imply that either one is ‘better’ than the other. It is up to the individual reader to decide which books mean most to them, and why, and the suggestion some writers made in response to the YouGov poll – that readers compile their own lists of classics – could not be more apposite. But to suggest that to even acknowledge these differences is to accuse the reader who

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