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Interzone #279 (January-February 2019)
Interzone #279 (January-February 2019)
Interzone #279 (January-February 2019)
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Interzone #279 (January-February 2019)

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The January–February 2019 issue contains new cutting edge science fiction and fantasy by Sean McMullen, Alison Wilgus, Tim Chawaga, G.V. Anderson, William Squirrel, and David Cleden. The 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner, and interior colour illustrations are by Richard Wagner and Martin Hanford. 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); Aliya Whiteley's Climbing Stories (comment); guest editorial by Sean McMullen.

Interzone's 2019 cover artist is Richard Wagner

Fiction:

The Backstitched Heart of Katharine Wright by Alison Wilgus
illustrated by Richard Wagner

The Fukinaga Special Chip Job by Tim Chawaga
illustrated by Richard Wagner

This Buddhafield is Not Your Buddhafield by William Squirrell

For the Wicked, Only Weeds Will Grow by G.V. Anderson
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Seven Stops Along the Graffiti Road by David Cleden
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Terminalia by Sean McMullen
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Features:

Guest Editorial: Escaping Into Visions
Sean McMullen

Future Interrupted: Do it All Over Again
Andy Hedgecock

Climbing Stories: Chaotic Goodness
Aliya Whiteley

Ansible Link
David Langford

Reviews:

Book Zone

Books reviewed include Puma by Anthony Burgess, Near Future by Suzannah Evans, Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson, Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox, Starfield edited by Duncan Lunan, The Sky Woman by J.D. Moyer, The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Ralph Breaks the Internet, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, The Grinch, Mortal Engines, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Overlord, Sorry to Bother You, Aquaman

LanguageEnglish
PublisherTTA Press
Release dateJan 15, 2019
ISBN9780463922347
Interzone #279 (January-February 2019)
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 #279 (January-February 2019) - TTA Press

    interzone_0_20_89_0.ai

    ISSUE #279

    JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2019

    Publisher

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

    w: ttapress.com

    e: interzone@ttapress.com

    f: TTAPress

    t: @TTApress

    shop: shop.ttapress.com

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

    Editor

    Andy Cox

    andy@ttapress.com

    Story Proofreader

    Peter Tennant

    whitenoise@ttapress.com

    Events

    Roy Gray

    roy@ttapress.com

    © 2019 Interzone & contributors

    Submissions

    Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system (tta.submittable.com/submit) 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 279 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

    TTA PRESS

    COPYRIGHT TTA PRESS AND CONTRIBUTORS 2019

    PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS

    CONTENTS

    COVER

    Cover 1 (2019) contents.tif

    OUR 2019 COVER ARTIST IS RICHARD WAGNER

    rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

    INTERFACE

    EDITORIAL: ESCAPING INTO VISIONS

    SEAN McMULLEN

    prisoner-contents.tif

    FUTURE INTERRUPTED

    ANDY HEDGECOCK

    originalsin2-contents.tif

    CLIMBING STORIES

    ALIYA WHITELEY

    Stan-Lee.tif

    ANSIBLE LINK

    DAVID LANGFORD

    FICTION

    backstitched heart (1a).tif

    THE BACKSTITCHED HEART OF KATHARINE WRIGHT

    ALISON WILGUS

    novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

    rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)

    fukinga chip job (alt 1).tif

    THE FUKINAGA SPECIAL CHIP JOB

    TIM CHAWAGA

    story illustrated by Richard Wagner

    buddhafield2.tif

    THIS BUDDHAFIELD IS NOT YOUR BUDDHAFIELD

    WILLIAM SQUIRRELL

    for the wicked 3 (dps).tif

    FOR THE WICKED, ONLY WEEDS WILL GROW

    G.V. ANDERSON

    story illustrated by Richard Wagner

    sevensteps.tif

    SEVEN STOPS ALONG THE GRAFFITI ROAD

    DAVID CLEDEN

    novelette illustrated by Martin Hanford

    www.deviantart.com/martinhanford1974

    terminalia (1a).tif

    TERMINALIA

    SEAN McMULLEN

    novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner

    REVIEWS

    sky-woman.tif

    BOOK ZONE

    books

    spiderverse-contents.tif

    MUTANT POPCORN

    NICK LOWE

    films

    EDITORIAL

    SEAN McMULLEN

    ESCAPING INTO VISIONS

    I keep being asked if the real world has caught up with science fiction. Generally it happens at parties, when people who do not read much science fiction are introduced to me. I first heard the question in the early 1980s, when we were no longer going to Mars, nuclear war was becoming unlikely, and one’s future seemed to involve nothing more exciting than a career in merchant banking. Then William Gibson’s Neuromancer came along, with visions of a totally wired, online lifestyle. People liked that. Science fiction was again ahead of the real world, and by the time the World Wide Web arrived we already knew exactly what to do with it.

    Something similar happened just over eight hundred years earlier. Until the Twelfth Century secular literature was dominated by the chanson de geste, which consisted mainly of psychopathic upper class oafs calling insults at each other and fighting. Women appeared in roughly two pages in a hundred. Then the 1160s saw the roman courtoise invented. Women featured in about two thirds of the pages, and when the warriors fought, it was generally for the honour of their lady…or someone else’s lady. Discrete adultery was a very popular theme.

    Europe’s aristocratic rulers liked the chivalric fantasies of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes so much that they quickly adopted the lifestyles described therein. Men began to wash regularly, clean their teeth and write love songs because suddenly there was more to courtship than knocking another guy off his horse with a twelve foot lance and hoping one’s lady noticed. Having become visible, women put their hands up for things like political power and property rights. Upwardly mobile merchants even read chivalric fantasies to learn how to live like aristocrats.

    If speculative fiction can change lifestyles, it can also advise us how not to change them. In The Time Machine H.G. Wells warned of the danger of actually achieving utopia and reminded us that we are kept keen on the grindstone of pain. George Orwell’s 1984 made us highly suspicious of government surveillance, but although Aldous Huxley warned us about genetically modifying ourselves in Brave New World, I’m not convinced that we heeded his warning.

    Now to answer that annoying question: has the real world caught up with science fiction? Not yet, but it’s closing in. Recently a colleague showed me his house on a satellite photo…and discovered his wife’s SUV and his friend’s sports car parked outside when both were meant to be at their respective offices. Divorce by satellite? How very Gibsonesque. Back in 1984 it was science fiction, but not any more.

    Literature certainly can steer our lifestyles with visions of what we may aspire to, or want to avoid. Worried about climate change? You should be, but could it force us to adopt desirable lifestyles and values that are radically different to those we have now? A novel describing such a vision is needed. Urgently. It’s dangerous to travel into the future without a preview.

    FUTURE INTERRUPTED

    ANDY HEDGECOCK

    prisoner.tif

    DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN

    In 1938 the philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote a long and influential essay about music, focusing on the tension between popularity and provocation. He argued that familiar and popular work provides short-term gratification, but music that dashed expectations and demands serious analysis enhances the lives of artists and audiences.

    Adorno saw repetition as a key determinant of popularity: The familiarity of a piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognise it. I guess that accounts for the enduring popularity of Coldplay, Oasis and Status Quo.

    Cinema is another art form which cashes in on echoes of the familiar. There have been more than two hundred films featuring Dracula and three hundred plus involving Sherlock Holmes. A small number of the Holmes scripts rework the original template to interesting effect (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1970; The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1976) but most plunder a cobwebbed library of plot devices, clichéd dialogue and visual tropes.

    There are magnificent remakes (The Thing, 1982; The Fly, 1986; 12 Monkeys, 1995) but there are many more that make you wonder why anyone bothered. Don’t even mention the buttock-clenchingly awful 2006 version of The Wicker Man.

    Some sequels deepen their audience’s understanding of themes, worlds and characters (Blade Runner 2049, 2017; The Empire Strikes Back, 1980). Others simply exhibit follow-on fatigue (Alien 3, 1992; X-Men Apocalypse, 2016).

    The incentive to reboot, rework and extend popular stories lies in the characteristics we require of a coherent narrative. Georges Polti identified thirty-six dramatic situations, Kurt Vonnegut proposed eight basic story arcs and Christopher Booker outlined seven basic plots (all involving Jungian archetypes).

    It’s assault course celluloid the money makers would avoid…

    Great storytellers can tackle a limited range of themes through a restricted set of forms but still create a fresh and unsettling experience. Which brings me to the director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (1928–2018).

    Roeg’s films concerned the sex-death nexus, strangers in strange lands, predestination, premonition, ritual, violence and the fluidity of identity. His signature techniques were cryptic dialogue; enigmatic symbols; emotionally detached performances; juxtaposed and recurring scenes; hallucinogenic imagery; and fragmented editing, with flashback and flashforward. An apparently restricted palette with which to reveal a narrow set of obsessions. And yet Roeg and his collaborators shaped these elements into seven magnificent movies, each of which astonished its audience and elicited a unique emotional response.

    They are: Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985).

    Don’t Look Now is Roeg’s masterpiece – the Sistine Chapel of horror movies. A symphony of speculation about perception, reality, love and loss, it encapsulates the whole of Roeg’s oeuvre but has a distinctive ‘feel’ and elicits a unique set of emotions. No one has a neutral reaction to a child in a red coat after watching this film.

    Living in the Past

    Roeg’s films highlighted the difference between originality and novelty. It’s a distinction that’s all too often lost on writers who rework well established stories, characters, plots and settings. Consider the case of The Prisoner. I’m (just) old enough to remember the furore surrounding the original Patrick McGoohan series, a rare show of surreal imagery, satire, black humour, technological speculation, political inquiry and psychodrama. McGoohan and his co-writers mixed 1984 with Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders to create an enclosed science fictional society, ‘the village’, based on totalitarian consumerism. Astonishing, complex and funny, The Prisoner took risks in terms of coherence and ‘polish’ – there is some appalling acting – but has influenced writers and production designers for fifty years.

    In the 2009 remake, a miniseries written by Bill Gallagher and directed by Nick Hurran, the acting was impeccable and careful homage was paid to McGoohan’s seminal series. The same themes – identify, social control, the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility – were addressed, and the episode titles even quoted from the 1960s originals. There were new characters, issues were dealt with unflinching directness and the production values were second to none. But it didn’t work. It was as if the production team were hamstrung by the inevitable comparisons to the original. The wit was gone, so was the fun.

    The fun is restored in the ‘audio revival’ of The Prisoner, produced by Big Finish and currently being broadcast by BBC Radio 4 Extra (December 2018). But there are a different set of irritations. Mark Elstob is an excellent Number 6, with McGoohan’s knack for flipping from melodrama to comedy, but giving a more nuanced performance: there’s a sense of menace to Elstob’s voice work that makes him a more convincing retired spy. There is an interesting framing story and a narrative unity across the episodes, some of which draw on the original scripts, some of which are entirely new. There are enjoyable metafictional games, involving twenty-first century technologies and the 1967 setting, and new layers of mystery. It’s witty, exciting and compelling radio – but there’s a problem. Some aspects of the narrative require familiarity with the original, particularly sequences in which dialogue is minimised and the story related through sound design. If you haven’t seen McGoohan’s celebrated opening sequence, part of the opening episode is baffling. For me, a well-performed, lively and interesting script has been undermined by nostalgia for a much-loved TV classic.

    Radio On

    While we’re contemplating the idea of originality in relation to radio drama, I’d like to draw attention to a couple of undercelebrated writers who merit the attention of Interzone readers.

    Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s writing for radio includes a reworking of the Arthurian legends, an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Casper Logue Affair, a black comedy written for a contemporary story cycle based on the Arabian Nights. But there are two pieces of work that confirm his reputation as a gifted and original storyteller.

    Altaban the Magnificent (1999) is set in Berlin at the end of World War Two and concerns an encounter between two members of the allied forces, a young British scientist and a battle-hardened American GI, and an illusionist who claims to be able to cheat death. The dialogue is full of brooding menace, the characters are rounded and believable and the focus flips effortlessly between the possibilities of magic and the grim realities of occupied Berlin.

    Baczkiewicz’s best known work is Pilgrim (2008–) a story cycle concerning William Palmer, an immortal man who has been forced to walk between the human world and the realm of magic since 1185. Radio 4 has broadcast eight series (most of which are available on CD or by download) of this series which splices myth and reality. The series explores the continuing relevance and resonance of British myths through stories of considerable complexity and emotional depth.

    Anita Sullivan’s plays for radio include retellings of five stories from The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories and an adaptation of Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn. But, once again, her most impressive work is original writing for radio. Mandrake, which mixes magic and the mundane, and concerns a woman who claims to be over 120 years old, is about the limits of rationalism. The Hedge is an allegory about a pair of retired political activists who encounter something fantastical beyond the impossibly high and deep hedge that encloses their lives. And, best of all, there’s Rock of Eye, in which a trio of traditional tailors are commissioned to produce a bespoke three-piece suit for a rising politician. It’s a story of the value of craft and (literally) diabolical corporate power. I can’t think of anything I’ve seen in the cinema or on TV in the last decade that captures the dangerous collision of consumerism and politics half as effectively.

    CLIMBING STORIES

    ALIYA WHITELEY

    originalsin2.tif

    CHAOTIC GOODNESS

    I’ve been putting in a lot of hours on my Xbox playing Divinity: Original Sin II, which allows me to explore an enormous landscape as a sarcastic lizard warrior who practises a bit of necromancy on the side. Video role-playing games have long fascinated me and I think the appeal springs from the same place as my early love of Fighting Fantasy books and Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the act of making a story through controlled choice presented as a narrative that suggests far more freedom than it actually bestows.

    Each adventure progresses through a series of decisions in a realm of finite possibilities, often presented as three or four options in dialogue or action. Admittedly, this is different to being a passenger only – most stories give the reader no choice whatsoever except in terms of how they interpret the adventure itself – but what it’s really offering is the sense of traversing a well-designed maze. I want to make the right choices to emerge intact. Fight the goblins or sneak past the dragon? Save your arrows or risk the dungeon? The goal is to build strength, constitution, intelligence, charisma, to the point where there is nothing left in that world to stand against me. That which doesn’t kill me always makes me stronger, in video RPG land.

    What has intrigued me about Divinity II in particular is that moment of culmination. My usual experience has been that the biggest battle is left until last, and that’s no different here. But following that moment there was a complex moral issue presented with the requisite three options to choose from, and the correct path was by no means clear. What kind of ending did I want? To save the world, or destroy it? I chose an option which I thought was the morally correct thing to do, and was informed that although my reasoning may have been laudable, in fact I’d ended up with the same old set of problems that I had been fighting against in the beginning. And yet I still feel quite good about my actions. As far as my lizard warrior persona was

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