Interzone #214, February 2008

This review should start with a declaration of interests. Eagle-eyed readers bored enough to have nothing better to do will note that the name of this reviewer appears in this issue of Interzone. For the last three years I have run Interzone’s annual Readers’ Poll—which basically amounts to eliciting, collecting, and counting the votes submitted by readers. The Readers’ Poll is a tradition that dates back long before the present publishers of Interzone took control of the magazine, and I took the task on because I didn’t want to see a tradition fade because no one else would do it. I receive no payment for the role; I have nothing to do with Interzone in terms of editorial content and no other affiliation to the magazine except that I’ve subscribed for some years. I’ve never even met the editor.

Unburdened of that, and aware that there will remain those out there who will consider this review unutterably tainted by my slight association, it is now my pleasure to go on to review Interzone #214.

Interzone is, without the slightest doubt, the prettiest, best designed and easiest to read science fiction magazine currently on the market. Almost every other publisher in the business should look at it and take lessons. From the beautiful, eerie cover of a part-constructed (or is it fractured?) space station by Paul Drummond, through the elegant, easy to read text to the neatly laid out reviews column, Interzone #214 is a first rate piece of magazine design and a pleasure to hold.

As well as that, Interzone regularly features some of the best non-fiction content in the field. Old favourites such as David Langford’s Ansible Link and Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn column of reliably incisive film reviews are easy to take for granted, but they remain essential reading. The recent return of John Clute to these pages and the refreshing of the book review content have improved that area, and the addition of DVD and Manga reviews round out a really impressive set of regulars. Add to that this issue’s interview with Iain M. Banks—Paul Raven struggles manfully with the author’s steadfast refusal to analyse his own work to deliver a piece that is a chummy and enjoyable, if not enlightening, read—and you have a package that no other print SF magazine comes close to matching.

But Interzone is primarily a fiction magazine, and it will be on its fiction that it is fundamentally judged. And it is here, it is fair to argue, where some of Interzone’s rivals have the edge. While Interzone features some very good stories—and has had some excellent recent issues—the quality of fiction in Interzone, on average, is not quite as high F&SF or the recently resurgent Asimov’s.

That’s not to say that there isn’t material here to hold one’s interest or delight.
Issue #214 opens with its longest piece, Jason Stoddard’s novella “Far Horizon”—which for me is a near miss of a story. Those familiar with Stoddard’s work will recognise the basic elements—a near-future dominated by corrupt government and all-encompassing corporations, risk-taking entrepreneurs, a solar system open for exploration, and lots and lots of big ideas. Stoddard has contributed a number of recognisably similar and generally memorable stories to Interzone in recent years, including the very enjoyable “Winning Mars” in issue 196. The formula is well-tested, and for the most part, it works, at least for so long as Stoddard maintains a high rate of forward momentum and doesn’t pause to allow the reader to think too much.

In “Far Horizon” the evil corporation is Winfinity (just not Microsoft enough to avoid lawsuits), and they are spreading their tentacles across the globe, throttling freedom at every turn to maintain market share and profitability. Multipurpose genius Alex Yucia (biologist, uber-geek and billionaire industrialist) wants to escape. The modest plan he comes up with encompasses constructing a space elevator, going on a three-thousand year journey in a spaceship in suspended animation, and the secret terraforming of Venus. Oh, and as a sideline, Alex also uplifts the intelligence of an angel-like chimera called Shekinah and, inadvertently, appears to cause the destruction of civilisation on two planets. And he even gets the girl!

So there’s a lot happening in “Far Horizon,” but that’s not the real problem with the story, because Stoddard copes with this big stuff with alacrity. The big stuff is what Stoddard is really good at.

It’s the smaller stuff where Alex stutters and Stoddard’s storytelling is suspect. Alex’s relationship with Adele—his personal assistant, business manager, computer nerd, and hopelessly-smitten sometimes-lover—simply doesn’t work. In every other part of her life, Adele comes across as a fearsomely intelligent and competent woman, so the fact that she behaves like such a hopeless doormat around Alex clangs horribly. Yet accepting her utter devotion is crucial to the story.

Worse, however, is that “Far Horizon” lacks a concrete conflict at its heart. Alex is, we are supposed to believe, driven by his outrage at the restrictions Winfinity have placed upon his desire to, single-handedly, transform the world with his inventions and by his desire to escape to an era where Winfinity’s control has ended so that he can find out what happens next—how mankind develops and reaches his potential.

Yet, as a corporation is wont to be, Winfinity is a pretty nebulous concept, and Alex’s “struggle” against it mostly amounts to running away from every conflict. As a result, the protagonist/antagonist relationship feels wafer thin, and Alex’s plans for escape become so expensive, dangerous, outlandishly ambitious, and ludicrously complex that the motivation on display simply doesn’t feel convincingly powerful enough to drive the story to such insane heights.

The Shekinah thread of the story—which itself modestly encompasses the ethics of genetic manipulation, Pygmalion, Flowers for Algernon, and civil rights for chimera—sits oddly beside the main plot. Again, Alex’s motivations are unclear, even suspect, and the sections delivered from Shekinah’s point of view are often disturbing. While the conclusion of Shekinah’s story is central to the final scenes, the two plotlines never seem to intersect as comfortably as they should.

“Far Horizon” is an interesting read. It’s packed full of speculation, and Stoddard charges at the whole thing with more than enough enthusiasm to carry the reader along with him. It’s only when the story stops and you have time to take a breath that the whole thing starts to feel like something that wasn’t built to last.

Jennifer Linnaea’s “Pseudo Tokyo” is a disappointing story. Set in a nearish future where, somehow, teleportation has replaced air travel, where tourism is allowed but a world government imposes draconian “Uniformity Laws,” weekend tripper Sean Randall finds himself transported to an alternate reality Tokyo. We can safely ignore explanation for Sean’s mishap—his “guide,” Haruki, was a lost traveller in our reality who tricks Sean and dumps him there in his own search to get home—as the author doesn’t bother following it up. Haruki’s gone by page two, never to return. Sean stumbles through a series of misadventures in a world that’s not entirely dissimilar to something Hayao Miyazaki might imagine, until he discovers that he’s actually a master at teleportation using just the power of his mind. But instead of using his power to jump home, he sets up business and lives happily ever after in his Pseudo Tokyo.

Too much of this story makes too little sense for it to be an enjoyable read. The science fiction and fantasy elements grate against each other—with two types of teleportation (scientific and mystical) coexisting in the same small space, parallel universes and mystic monsters, and the overcooked theme of shiny, modern Tokyo hiding mystical Japan. Too many elements are dropped in as tokens of strangeness without sufficient thought. What would a government who could impose “Uniformity Laws” strict enough to demand specific dress codes to preserve distinct cultures be doing countenancing tourism in the first place? If teleportation is as easy as Sean makes it seem, why did Haruki need him in the first place? Of course the real reason why these questions clang so loudly in the reader’s brain is because “Pseudo Tokyo” doesn’t offer enough emotional depth, character construction, or incident to distract us from its fundamental shortcomings.

If Interzone’s general level of fiction isn’t always as high as its competitors, it is capable of printing stories good enough to make your eyes water. Christopher Priest’s “The Trace of Him” is one such story.

“The Trace of Him” takes Christopher Priest back to the site of a series of stories first collected in 1999 in The Dream Archipelago but written almost twenty years before in the late 1970s. This story is also one of return. A woman travels back, after twenty years, along the length of the Dream Archipelago to the home of a famous writer, a man with whom she had a brief affair, and a man whom she has continued to love despite years of absence. Now he is dead, and she has been asked to attend his funeral

Priest is one of genre’s most distinctive stylists. His prose is sharp and precise and rarely wastes a word, but there is an unmistakable Englishness to his writing—a parochialism (if that’s not too rude a word) that manifests itself in a flat control of emotions. It’s not that feeling is absent; this short tale packs more feeling and insight into it than almost any you’ll read this year, but it is never allowed off the leash.

Take this passage:

The intimacy of the room was a shock to her. For so long his study had been a memory, a hidden joyful secret, but now it had become tragic, bereft of him. She could detect the scent of his clothes, his books, his leather document case, the old frayed carpet. His presence could be felt in every darkened corner, in the two squares of bright sunlight on the floor, in the dust on the bookshelves and on the volumes that stood there in untidy leaning lines, in the sticky ochre grime on the window panes, the yellowed papers, the dried careless spills of ink.

The intimacy and the pain of loss drips through every minutely noted detail, but there are no tears, no gnashing of teeth, no emotional outbursts or cod-psychological insights. There’s only the forensic dissection of all that is present in the environment and, at the heart of it all, the outline of the shape, the person, the character that is missing.

“The Trace of Him” is a short, bittersweet, beautiful story. The central character’s distance from the world she finds herself returned to, the fleeting ghostly apparition that forms the heart of the story, and the sense of yearning but of inevitable moving on are powerfully handled.

Jennifer Harwood-Smith’s “The Faces of My Friends” is the kind of story that, frankly, could only have been written by someone very young. That’s not meant to be a slight, it’s just that the story is so fervently idealistic that when the author confesses that the idea came to her “walking home from college…after a semester of cultural theory” no one could possibly be surprised.

The story sees a group of innocent outcasts, tormented and cruelly treated by society for the heinous crime of being born different. They are battered, killed, spirited away to organ banks and generally made miserable and reduced to writing “Why?” on walls. In the end, only the narrator, Gabrielle, remains, and, rather than go meekly to her fate, she decides to make a final stand. And her “crime”—why Gabrielle is an artist, a novelist, and her friends were simple painters and singers and poets and their only crime—was to live in society where such winsome pastimes are the stuff of treason.

“The Faces of My Friends” is this year’s winner of the James White Award, which is an award for non-professional writers and is designed to promote writers at the early stages of their career. As such, rough edges (and boundless idealism) can be forgiven, but despite the implausibility of the plot, this is by no means a badly written story, though the central character walks a narrow path between desperation at her plight and whiny self-pity—teetering dangerously towards the latter in places.

Still, James White—himself a man of boundless idealism and believer in the best that mankind could become—might very well approve of the award made in his name going to a writer who could be so inspired by injustices she sees in the world. This story probably wouldn’t have made it into Interzone if it had had to pass through the normal slushpile process, but its does the magazine credit to devote a little space each year to this award and to developing writers.

The final story here is “The Scent of their Arrival” by Mercurio D. Rivera. Aliens, who communicate primarily by sense of smell, receive a transmission from a spaceship orbiting their planet. The transmission comes from a human and tells of the disaster that has befallen Earth—which involves a rift in reality and creatures, who just happen to mimic in every respect human conceptions of demons, surging through it. But the aliens are unable to decipher the message, and something dangerous may be following close behind.

As a first contact tale, the structure of the story is problematic because it is told from the point of view of the alien scientists who are trying to figure out how humans communicate. Normally with these stories, part of the pleasure in them comes from working out the puzzle before the author reveals the secret. In this instance, however, the reader knows how humans communicate, and it is difficult not to feel frustrated at the aliens’ failure. Rivera is clearly attempting to construct a rising tension as the truth of the situation unfolds from the narration of the last man, but it isn’t entirely successful.

More annoying, however, is the nature of the threat from “The Reviled”—the evil aliens/demons that destroy Earth and now threaten this new world. It adds nothing to make these creatures conform to the worn-through horror clichés. If Rivera was aiming at adding some sort of deeper resonance through religious allegory, he fails, and the portrayal of The Reviled in this way feels lazy, undermining some of the story’s more effective sections.

That said, “The Scent of Their Arrival” rallies in the final passage, which sees the aliens awaiting first contact with their visitors from afar with a mixture of religious fervour and optimism while the reader cowers from the carnage that must follow.

On the whole, there is more that is good in this issue of Interzone than is bad. The Priest story is a little gem, the Stoddard story has strong ideas and great pace, and to be cruel to Harwood-Smith’s offering would be like kicking a puppy—mean. Rivera’s offering has some interesting ideas but undermines itself, leaving only Linnaea’s “Pseudo Tokyo” as the only offering here without significant redeeming features. Combined with the non-fiction lineup, the beautiful art, and the strong design, that makes Interzone #214 a very strong package, even if there remains room for improvement.

[Disclosure notice: The Fix is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Interzone.]