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    Interzone #277 (September-October 2018)
    Interzone #277 (September-October 2018)
    Interzone #277 (September-October 2018)
    Ebook234 pages1 hour

    Interzone #277 (September-October 2018)

    By TTA Press

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    About this ebook

    The September–October contains new cutting edge science fiction and fantasy by Gregor Hartmann, Shauna O'Meara, Joanna Berry, Aliya Whiteley, and Samantha Murray. The cover art is by Vince Haig, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Ben Baldwin, and Vincent Sammy. 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); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment); guest editorial by Aliya Whiteley.

    Cover Art: Abductees 4 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

    Fiction:

    Inscribed on Dark Water by Gregor Hartmann
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    The Sea Maker of Darmid Bay by Shauna O'Meara
    illustrated by Ben Baldwin

    The Analogue of Empathy by Joanna Berry
    illustrated by Vincent Sammy

    Territory: Blank by Aliya Whiteley

    Singles' Day by Samantha Murray
    illustrated by Richard Wagner

    Features:

    Guest Editiral
    Aliya Whiteley

    Future Interrupted: Smart Dildos, Cosy Delusions
    Andy Hedgecock

    Time Pieces: Onwards and Upwards
    Nina Allan

    Ansible Link: News, Obituaries
    David Langford

    Reviews:

    Book Zone

    Books reviewed include Twelve Tomorrows (2018) edited by Wade Roush, Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi, The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri, Liminal by Bee Lewis, Infinity's End edited by Jonathan Strahan, Supercute Futures by Martin Millar, Literature® by Guillermo Stitch, Uncommon Miracles by Julie C. Day, Secret Passages in a Hillside Town by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

    Mutant Popcorn
    Nick Lowe

    Films reviewed include The Meg, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Incredibles 2, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, The Darkest Minds, Christopher Robin, The Happytime Murders, Hotel Transylvania 3: A Monster Vacation, Luis and the Aliens, The First Purge, Hotel Artemis

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTTA Press
    Release dateSep 10, 2018
    ISBN9780463488492
    Interzone #277 (September-October 2018)
    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 #277 (September-October 2018) - TTA Press

      interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

      ISSUE #277

      SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018

      Publisher

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

      w: ttapress.com

      e: interzone@ttapress.com

      f: TTAPress

      t: @TTApress

      shop: TTA Shop

      Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address

      Editor

      Andy Cox

      andy@ttapress.com

      Events

      Roy Gray

      roy@ttapress.com

      © 2018 Interzone & 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 277 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2018

      TTA PRESS

      COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2018

      PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

      CONTENTS

      Abductees-4-contents.tif

      ABDUCTEES 4 by 2018 COVER ARTIST VINCE HAIG

      www.barquing.com

      INTERFACE

      undiscovered.tif

      EDITORIAL

      ALIYA WHITELEY

      seventeen-contradictions.tif

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      ANDY HEDGECOCK

      dollmaker.tif

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      jemison-hugo.tif

      ANSIBLE LINK

      DAVID LANGFORD

      FICTION

      dark water (use).tif

      INSCRIBED ON DARK WATER

      GREGOR HARTMANN

      novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

      rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

      The Sea Maker of Darmid Bay.tif

      THE SEA MAKER OF DARMID BAY

      SHAUNA O’MEARA

      novelette illustrated by Ben Baldwin

      benbaldwin.co.uk

      analogue of empathy artwork.tif

      THE ANALOGUE OF EMPATHY

      JOANNA BERRY

      novelette illustrated by Vincent Sammy

      www.deviantart.com/karbonk

      jungle3.tif

      TERRITORY: BLANK

      ALIYA WHITELEY

      story

      single's day (use).tif

      SINGLES’ DAY

      SAMANTHA MURRAY

      novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

      REVIEWS

      firstpurge-contents.tif

      MUTANT POPCORN

      NICK LOWE

      films

      literature.tif

      BOOK ZONE

      books

      EDITORIAL

      ALIYA WHITELEY

      One of my favourite Star Trek moments can be found in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Kirk and his crew are hosting a tense dinner party that cannot be enlivened even by serving Romulan ale. A lasting peace might be brokered with the Klingons, but there are vast cultural differences to overcome. Perhaps a mutual love of literature can bring them together? Shakespeare is, apparently, universal but Klingon Chancellor Gorkon points out that You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

      Whenever I watch this I end up thinking: Who owns a story?

      We carry so many stories and call them a past. E.H. Carr wrote that history is an interpretation of the past; are we all, when we cultivate our personal histories, acting as our own internal historians? It becomes a really confusing business when we include all the other stories that we pick up along the way. It doesn’t matter whether they’re true or false, remembered or invented, or stolen wholesale from somebody else’s imagination. We are collections of tales and happenings walking around with our denouements hanging out, flapping in the breeze behind us.

      For instance, I’m fairly certain that my first memory isn’t true. I’ve created that flash moment of sitting in the back of a truck amongst packed furniture, having been given a Creme Egg to keep me occupied, as we set off for a new house. I built this memory from snippets of my parents’ stories, but when I describe it they don’t recognise any of the details. Where did those details come from?

      In writing ‘Territory: Blank’ (my story in this edition) I found I was already hauling around with me hundreds of tales of exploration and adventure, and they were just waiting to get in on the action. The Lost World was present, along with The Land that Time Forgot. Heart of Darkness and Alien and The Mosquito Coast, too. I tried to stay aware of them all, recognising them as influences in the hope of not blindly repeating them, but I suspect that’s an impossible task.

      And there’s Star Trek, of course; a great big story of going forth into the absolute unknown. What could be more of a blank sheet than outer space? Could anybody ever claim to own that?

      It turns out there are no blank sheets. The moment I set off into empty territory I fill it with myself, and the stories I’m carrying. There’s no such thing as an undiscovered country in stories. I’m not sure whether that’s a comforting thought or a worrying one.

      On the subject of boldly going, I’ll be entering strange and exciting space from the next issue of Interzone by writing a regular column about stories and how we live with them. I won’t even attempt to step into Nina Allan’s wonderful shoes, but will hopefully head off in a different direction – one I haven’t been in before. I hope to see you there.

      FUTURE INTERRUPTED

      ANDY HEDGECOCK

      SMART DILDOS, COSY DELUSIONS

      In the mid-seventeenth century a Polish kabbalist reported the magical dabbling of Rabbi Elijah Ba’al Shem of Chelm. Rabbi Elijah’s synthesis of an anthropomorphic slave, the golem, from mud and Kabbalistic ritual became the model for four hundred years of storytelling about humanity’s potential for liberation, enslavement or annihilation by technology.

      The earliest stories of conflict between manufactured and organic intelligence climaxed in gladiatorial conflicts between people and machines. A notable example is the homicidal chess-playing automaton of Ambrose Bierce’s strange and ambiguous story ‘Moxon’s Master’ (1899). By the late twentieth century sf was tackling the complex existential and societal impact of machine consciousness. Consider the genocidal military supercomputer torturing the remnants of humanity in Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ (1967); Skynet, the self-aware and self-serving AI ‘defence’ network in the Terminator series (1984–2015); and the wetware-programmed corporate workforces of Michael Swanwick’s ‘Vacuum Flowers’ (1987). Our fascination with the destructive potential of AI has not abated: a core premise of Microsoft’s Mass Effect 3 (2012), set in the late 22nd century, is that the coexistence of organic and synthetic intelligence will become impossible.

      There are positive stories about our relationship with intelligent technologies, such as Iain M. Banks’ ‘culture’ novels, but they are rare. Even writers who deliberately steer clear of dystopian clichés elicit mixed feelings about societies dominated by AIs. Charles Stross’ Accelerando and Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division explore the possibility of alternative economic and political systems with ebullient optimism, the far future environments they depict are inimical to human cognition as we currently understand it.

      Throughout this vast body of work the key fear is that the technological singularity, in which AI designs and manufactures AI+, will result in the redundancy and extinction of organic intelligence – aka humanity.

      A focus on output rather than process means storytellers and futurologists overlook threats from existing technologies. There are risks to human autonomy in the relationships we are already building with our machines.

      If you need any persuasion that digital technology is rapidly transforming mass behaviour, consider changes in doorbell ringing and the training of passenger transport drivers.

      Ask someone under 25 to mime ringing a doorbell and they’ll extend their thumb. Ask someone over 50 and they’ll extend their forefinger. Try it. Those born in the age of the internet use their thumbs to text, change channels with a remote and operate joysticks. As David Coveney of Marking Week notes: It took us millions of years to lose our tails. Sony and Apple achieved the doorbell feat in a decade.

      The passenger transport effect? Forward planning for people who step into the road while texting has become a standard aspect of initial training for city-based bus drivers.

      There’s nothing sinister or deleterious about these changes in behaviour, unless you walk under a bus while playing Fortnite, but the transformational impact of ‘everyday’ technology carries a range of risks to people and society.

      According to the anthropologist David Harvey, Much of the dynamic of technological change has been orchestrated to disempower the worker. For Harvey a key facilitator of this orchestration is the humanisation of the barren culture of technology in popular books and films (Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions, 2014). He cites the development of feelings by the replicants in Blade Runner, the acquisition of expressive language by the ‘fabricant’ clone Sonmi-451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the tears shed over bloated, shopping-obsessed humanity by the robots in Wall-E.

      Some of these narratives consciously promote a notion of humane AI, others simply respond to our innate need to seek validation and connection with a wide range of objects in our world, animate and inanimate.

      Joseph Weizenbaum, often described as one of the pioneers of modern computer science, was a key thinker in relation to the ethics of AI. In Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) he described experiments at MIT with an early ‘chatterbot’ programme called ‘Eliza’, a natural language simulation that used a matching and replacement algorithm to create an illusion of dialogue. One of the scripts Weizenbaum developed for Eliza was DOCTOR, which parodied the form of therapy championed by psychologist Carl Rogers. The intention was to highlight the superficiality of human-machine interaction, but the experiment’s participants engaged in serious consultation with the ‘therapist’, and MIT academics described the programme as ‘a sensation’. Even Weizenbaum’s secretary, fully briefed on the spurious nature of the therapy, began to insist on privacy while she conversed with DOCTOR.

      In addition to casting doubt on the validity of the Turing Test for AI, the Eliza case demonstrates that people are predisposed to accept mechanistic reasoning as a substitute for decision-making. What I had not realized, wrote Weizenbaum, is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.

      In the years since Weizenbaum identified the tendency to seek virtual validation from computer programmes, digital industries have consolidated their power by embedding technologies in a web of PR and politics. In Unreal Objects (2017) Kate O’Riordan considers the way corporate narratives about the potential of emerging technologies determines the way we use them. One of the familiar tools she examines is the personal biosensor – an increasingly familiar technology, particularly for those (like me) whose life insurance premiums are raised if we refuse to use it. One product, Fitbit, is described as a data driven fitness device but O’Riordan asks who is really doing the driving. Users are told they can be proactive in making the technology work for them. The language used to sell the product stresses the agency of the user, but the Fitbit vision is a narrow and tyrannical framing of life. This is a technology, O’Riordan says, that reduces human experience to the quantified self and redefines self-knowledge in terms of data monitoring. Biosensors gamify leisure time – friends compete to see who can do the most steps per day – and demand personal productivity in our leisure time.

      Energy grids are another area of concern for O’Riordan, because they are an oversimplified technological fix we use to dodge tough decisions. What society needs, she asserts, is serious investment in the field of renewables and a genuine effort to reduce consumption. Instead, a ‘personalised’ technology based on smart grids and meters is promoted at the expense of solutions that are genuinely sustainable.

      This notion of a false sense of agency was also discussed in a recent Ted Talk by Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu, who said consumers tend to collude in their own surveillance by advertisers and data brokers. Hill and Mattu referred to smart coffee makers that only activate if a specific brand name is mentioned, a smart toothbrush that returns usage data to a dental insurance company and a smart dildo that data mines its user’s orgasm without consent. Homes crammed with internet-enabled devices are becoming commercial panopticons, they suggested.

      We are surprisingly keen to use IT to mediate our relationships. At a recent Axios Media event, the former President of Facebook said the company’s founding question was how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? He continued by saying that, from the outset, Facebook’s founders created an addictive tool that exploited a vulnerability in human psychology.

      This brings us back to the late Professor Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the few computer scientists to balance a sense of possibility and serious moral outlook. Computers can make judicial decisions, he said, computers can make psychiatric judgments. The point is that they ought not be given such tasks. In other words, let’s not be in too much of a hurry to surrender human judgement to calculation. It might not take a Terminator to destroy humanity, just the propensity to humanise mundane technologies and sleepwalk into a future of marketing-led totalitarianism.

      TIME PIECES

      NINA ALLAN

      ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

      Believe it or not – and I find it hard to – this edition of Time Pieces marks the fourth anniversary of the column. With some regret, I’ve decided that now is the right moment to hand the baton to someone else. A change is as good as a rest, and I’m sure these pages will benefit from a fresh voice, with fresh points of view. I am also in the early stages of planning a new non-fiction project, one that is going to take a lot of my critical energy and that will make it impossible to give this column my full attention. So this is goodbye, for now at least. But what a time we’ve had.

      I started writing Time Pieces in the late summer of 2014. Chris and I had just moved house. My first novel The Race had just been launched at the London Worldcon. As we look forward to the Dublin Worldcon in 2019, my second novel The Rift is out in the world, my third novel The Dollmaker is on the runway, and my fourth – title still to be decided – is just about complete in first draft. There is still a lot of work to be done, but I’m pleased with the way things are going. In terms of my life as a writer it has been an inspiring and fulfilling four years, and I relish the challenge and excitement of speculative fiction more than ever.

      In terms of politics, things have been pretty much the opposite. I happened to come across an old interview of mine (‘Twenty Years, Two Surveys’ from 2010) in which I speak of how much it means to me, to be an English writer. This ground felt sturdy under my feet, the bedrock of my creative identity. I’ve left the interview up at my website precisely because parts of it now read to me like dispatches from another planet. The 2016 Brexit referendum left me feeling not just furious but distressed at a level that is still hard to articulate. I began to realise that many of the assumptions I had made about what England ‘meant’ had been if not wrong then bent severely out of shape by the divisive political culture currently prevailing. The election of Donald Trump as US President a mere six months later felt like a mean right hook, a farcical aggregation of what the Tory party had begun in weaponising the so-called ‘will of the people’, of the Labour leadership’s abject dereliction of duty in not properly opposing it.

      The idea that I might want to leave England would have seemed ludicrous to me in 2010 – but then it happened. As the Tories continue to dismantle the welfare state – a series of measures that can only compound the hardship a no-deal Brexit would visit upon our already fragile society and upon the vulnerable most of all – you could maintain with a fair degree of accuracy that they are dismantling England itself.

      For the science fiction writer in particular, it feels impossible, just for the moment, to find an adequate response. Anger and a sense of helplessness get in the way. Events are still moving too quickly for anything approaching a durable representation of what is happening. As we struggle to find words that might promote effective resistance, we can at least note the small but significant steps that have been taken within our own field to foster a more progressive and exploratory attitude in science fiction literature. Small beer when compared with the crushing forces from without, perhaps, but change is always most effective and lasting when generated from within, and we should not discount the importance of individual voices in highlighting and defining a broader struggle.

      When I sent in my first Time

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