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    Interzone #265 (July-August 2016)
    Interzone #265 (July-August 2016)
    Interzone #265 (July-August 2016)
    Ebook223 pages2 hours

    Interzone #265 (July-August 2016)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The July–August issue of Britain's longest running science fiction and fantasy magazine contains new stories by John Schoffstall, Dan Reade, Suzanne Palmer, Ken Hinckley, Andrew Kozma, and Robert Reed. The 2016 cover artist is Vincent Sammy, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Martin Hanford, Dave Senecal, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Features: Editorial by Jo L. Walton; 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 an interview with Lisa Tuttle); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment).

    Cover Art:

    If That's The Way That It Is by Vincent Sammy

    Fiction:

    All Your Cities I Will Burn by John Schoffstall
    illustrated by Martin Hanford

    The Eye of Job by Dan Reade
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Belong by Suzanne Palmer

    On the Techno-Erotic Potential of Donald Trump under Conditions of Partially Induced Psychosis by Ken Hinckley
    illustrated by Dave Senecal

    The Inside-Out by Andrew Kozma
    illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

    A Man of Modest Means by Robert Reed

    Features:

    Editorial
    Jo L. Walton

    Future Interrupted
    Jonathan McCalmont

    Time Pieces
    Nina Allan

    Ansible Link
    David Langford

    Reviews:

    Book Zone
    Lisa Tuttle interviewed by Juliet E. McKenna, plus books by Kabuki Takano, Guy Gabriel Kay. Michael Swanwick, Paul McAuley, Sofia Samata, Salman Rushdie, James Lovegrove, M. Duddain and others

    Mutant Popcorn
    Nick Lowe
    Cinema releases reviewed include Gods of Egypt, X-Men: Apocalypse, Captain America: Civil War, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Warcraft: The Beginning, Angry Birds, Ratchet & Clank, Independence Day: Resurgence, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, When Marnie Was There, Tale of Tales

    Laser Fodder
    Tony Lee
    DVDs and Blu-rays reviewed include The 5th Wave, The Call Up, Enemy Mine

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateJul 11, 2016
    ISBN9781310008412
    Interzone #265 (July-August 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 #265 (July-August 2016) - TTA Press

      interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

      ISSUE #265

      JULY-AUGUST 2016

      Publisher

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

      w: ttapress.com

      e: interzone@ttapress.com

      f: TTAPress

      t: @TTApress

      Editor

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      Book Reviews Editor

      Jim Steel

      jim@ttapress.com

      Story Proofreader

      Peter Tennant

      Events

      Roy Gray

      roy@ttapress.com

      © 2016 Interzone & its contributors

      Submissions

      Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system, but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.

      logo cmyk.tif

      SMASHWORDS REQUESTS THAT WE ADD THE FOLLOWING:

      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 265 JULY-AUGUST 2016

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2016

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      04- If that's the way that it is -contents.tif

      IF THAT’S THE WAY THAT IT IS by VINCENT SAMMY

      karbonk.deviantart.com

      Lisa in Venice contents.tif

      LISA TUTTLE

      interviewed by Juliet E. McKenna in Book Zone

      INTERFACE

      EDITORIAL

      JO L. WALTON

      small-angry-planet.tif

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      JONATHAN McCALMONT

      yale.tif

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      ANSIBLE LINK

      DAVID LANGFORD

      FICTION

      all-your-cities-i-will-burn.tif

      ALL YOUR CITIES I WILL BURN

      JOHN SCHOFFSTALL

      illustrated by Martin Hanford

      martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

      eye of job.tif

      THE EYE OF JOB

      DAN READE

      illustrated by Richard Wagner

      rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

      BELONG

      SUZANNE PALMER

      EroticTrump_color_senecal.tif

      On the Techno-Erotic Potential of Donald Trump under Conditions of Partially Induced Psychosis

      KEN HINCKLEY

      illustrated by Dave Senecal

      senecal.deviantart.com

      The Inside Out 1 Warwick Fraser-Coombe.tif

      THE INSIDE-OUT

      ANDREW KOZMA

      illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

      warwickfrasercoombe.blogspot.co.uk

      A MAN OF MODEST MEANS

      ROBERT REED

      REVIEWS

      WORLD-OF-WATER.tif

      BOOK ZONE

      books

      xmen-apocalypse-contents.tif

      MUTANT POPCORN

      NICK LOWE

      films

      drak-contents.tif

      LASER FODDER

      TONY LEE

      DVDs & Blu-rays

      EDITORIAL

      JO L. WALTON

      After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. Sublemon: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.

      Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: Best Action Sequence, Best Twist, Best Ending, Best Villain? Best New Award? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously. On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence. And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: vote if you want, who gives a shit. Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.

      In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes’, and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.

      The second is politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes. Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written from the standpoint of redemption, and embedded in plexiglass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.

      Oh and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      JONATHAN McCALMONT

      Telling People What They Want To Be

      small-angry-planet.tif

      The history of science fiction teaches us that a little social relevance can be a dangerous thing. Commercial science fiction did not come fully-formed, it sprang from a pre-history littered with prestigious ancestors who laid foundations, coined phrases, and paved ways. People like Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell prospered because they recognised the thematic links between this pre-history and the emerging crazes for popular science and amateur radio. These early fandoms provided editors with pre-existing audiences and commercial science fiction was born of the desire to pander to those audiences by validating their identities and telling them what they wanted to hear.

      Leaf through a collection of old stories like Robert Silverberg’s excellent first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and you’ll see that science fiction spent the 1930s selling fantasies of technical competence to amateur engineers. By the late 1950s, that audience had collapsed only to be replaced by a much larger audience made up of men desperate to forget all of the terrible things they had seen and done in Europe, Japan, and Korea. Ever happy to connect, science fiction pandered to those sensibilities and sold them war stories in which the enemy’s inhumanity justified any and all actions taken against them. When the Vietnam War divided America into two political camps, genre publishing sold Heinlein novels to the veterans who still believed in just wars and Haldeman novels to those who returned from war filled with alienation and guilt. Science fiction became a mass-market commodity by positioning itself somewhere between harsh reality and complete fantasy; pre-historic literary tools designed to open up complex worlds now served to simplify reality by knocking off awkward moral edges and producing moral fantasies that vaguely resembled the truth.

      The commercial decline of literary science fiction stems from the publishing industry’s failure to recognise groups that were as vulnerable to exploitative pandering as the white, middle-class men of the 1950s and ’60s. Sure…the New Wave, Feminist SF, Cyberpunk and Paranormal Romance all found their audiences but none of those populations proved insecure enough to ensure the long-term financial stability of genre publishing. Of course, it doesn’t help that the industry’s prejudice and self-regard also made it slow to react. Indeed, while genre publishing might have got in on the ground floor when it came to constructing the 20th Century nerd, it has now spent decades on the back foot, jumping from one collapsed subjectivity to another. What was Grimdark fantasy if not an attempt at pandering to teenage Dungeons & Dragons players that arrived decades after most of those kids had already grown up and moved on?

      With sales of epic fantasy on the decline, genre publishing now finds itself in search of a new economic heartland. Given the similarities in subject matter, you would expect genre publishing to begin pumping out Young Adult novels but institutional sexism and general incompetence allowed genre publishing to miss yet another boat and now it faces the impossible task of imposing itself on a mature marketplace complete with its own imprints and hierarchies. Thankfully, the critical and commercial success of Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy revealed an emerging mass market for grown-up science fiction but with genre publishers still encouraging popular science fiction authors like Aliette de Bodard and Kameron Hurley to write fantasy novels, the race is now on to turn the old tanker around and become the imprint best able to bridge the gap between old-fashioned science fiction and new-fangled senses of self.

      Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was a small crowdfunding initiative until it was sucked into the gears of genre publishing by an unexpected nomination for best debut novel at the 2014 Kitschies. Republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015, the novel soon found itself on both the shortlist for this year’s Clarke Award and the longlist for this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. These nominations alone were enough to make Chambers’ book an important work of science fiction but there is no denying that it speaks explicitly to the now.

      Small Angry Planet begins with its wealthy point-of-view character taking a job as PA to the captain of a privately-owned starship that builds hyperspace motorways for a polity known as the Galactic Commons. This captain turns out to be an ambitious man and his desire to upgrade his ship and pursue bigger contracts pushes him to accept a job that sends his unarmed ship and crew into a war zone. Despite much of the plot revolving around the desire to acquire and spend money, Small Angry Planet has no interest in developing any kind of critical distance from the social, moral, and psychological pressures that capitalism brings to bear. Small Angry Planet may be a novel about work but its vision of work is as much of a moral fantasy as Heinlein’s vision of warfare.

      With the book’s plot, world-building, and set-dressing all trying very hard to pretend that the New Wave never happened, praise for Small Angry Planet has mostly accrued to its liberal politics and the fact that each member of the ship’s crew operates as a stand-in for a variety of marginalised groups. Thus, the protagonist is presented as being privileged by virtue of her planet-based upbringing while humans raised on spaceships are representative of a more numerous and less-privileged working class. From there on in, the representation grows ever-more awkward as Chambers begins carving up old stereotypes and stitching the pieces together to produce a variety of alien races and cultures. For example, there’s a race of lizard people who are more sexual and more emotionally-expressive than humans in a way that recalls racist caricatures of African American people. Also familiar are the race of technologically-advanced fish people who are enigmatic and delicately beautiful as per the orientalist fantasies that are frequently projected onto the people of South East Asia. The crew also includes alien twins who occupy a single identity because of a mystical virus that turned them into the skiffy version of an autistic savant and an engineer whose Luddite mother refused him treatment for Dwarfism. The list of recognisable identities goes on and on, each of them serving principally as an opportunity for the book’s privileged protagonist to win people over by learning about differing cultural attitudes to things like personal space and pronoun usage. It all seems amazingly sweet and earnest until you realise that this vision of workplace understanding is just another example of bad science fiction selling us a vision of the world with all of the uncomfortable edges sanded off.

      At a time when professional spaces demand greater acts of ruthlessness and social spaces demand greater performances of righteousness, this novel tells ambitious middle-class people that it is easy to be morally righteous and politically progressive. Most people who are raised middle-class are raised to engage with society in a way that perpetuates existing hierarchies and so contributes to the grotesque social inequalities that define the capitalist system. The first step towards becoming a progressive is to recognise that the society that gives you wealth and status dehumanises others and that every step you take up the ladder is assisted by centuries of brutal prejudice. Chambers is selling a fantasy because in her universe you don’t need to check your privilege, make sacrifices, or work for meaningful change. You just turn up, behave professionally, use the right pronouns, and marginalised groups will literally fall over themselves to shower you with status, money, sex, and the kind of acceptance that is rightly denied to those who actively benefit from the immiseration of others.

      Small Angry Planet achieves this fantasy by severing stereotypes from their real-world origins and projecting them onto a universe where fictional analogues of real identities are naturally occurring and not products of a pervasively dehumanising capitalism. By removing capitalism from the equation, Chambers creates a fantasy world in which you can be righteously progressive and unapologetically ambitious. Just as Heinlein once sold fantasies of righteous genocide to guilt-ridden war veterans, Chambers is selling fantasies of political correctness to people who yearn to be part of the solution when everyone from their parents to their co-workers expects them to grow up, behave and assume their place as part of the problem. Sometimes a little relevance can be a profoundly ugly thing.

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      Canon Fodder

      yale.tif

      Debates about what constitutes ‘canon’ are ten a penny within the science fiction community. Barely a week seems to pass without someone getting up on a metaphorical podium to insist that in order to have a valid opinion on the current field, any seriously committed fan will as a matter of course need to have read Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Campbell, Clarke. Such claims and counter claims are by no means confined to the SF world, however. Last month, students of English Literature at Yale University launched a petition demanding that English 125/6, a study module covering major pre-20th-century English poets and a compulsory course requirement, be dropped from the curriculum. It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might study only white male authors, ran the text of the petition. A year spent around the seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity…and creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of colour.

      As the petition gathered support from undergraduates and members of the academic staff, the backlash was inevitable. In an article at Slate, journalist and former Yale student Katy Waldman argued in favour of the English department’s current course requirements, insisting that if you want to become well versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot… The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it.

      Waldman’s argument, that in order to properly appreciate the work of writers such as Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Wole Soyinka we must first steep ourselves in the language and literary values of Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare is a familiar one. The question of whether it is true is more complex. The line that most disturbs me in Katy Waldman’s response to the Yale petition runs: "the canon is what

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