Interzone

Cover:

Sky Burial #3 by Wayne Haag

 

Contents:

 

Fiction:

Must Supply Own Work Boots by Malcolm Devlin
illustrated by Richard Wagner

A thirty-foot baby loomed over the main gate to the docks; pink skin airbrushed and flawless, its wide smile was all gums and its eyes shone with innocent wonder. It promised perfection through embryonic engineering and IVF treatment, but the scale of the billboard made the child appear monstrous to those at street level.

 

Bullman and the Wiredling Mutha by RM Graves

Bullman eat no meat. Bullman eat green fur and weed from broken carpark’s mudstone. Bullman not like fight. Smash gangs bad. Make hurt and blood and insides out. Make Bullman weep. Bullman not like meat.

 

The Calling of Night's Ocean by Thana Niveau
illustrated by Martin Hanford 

The man watches me leap from the water. I arch my body, soaring upwards. I climb higher and higher until at last I can go no further. I hang in the sky like a cloud, a being of pure exuberance. It’s only for a moment but time seems to hold still for me. I feel like I could stay here forever up above the flickering waves. Hovering, drifting. But then, as it always does, the water pulls me back and I plunge inside its cool depths once more.

 

Finding Waltzer-Three by Tim Major
illustrated by Wayne Haag

A static-filled sigh comes across the comms link. Richard leans close to the speaker housed in the tall control unit. When his wife speaks, he jolts back in alarm.

“Toss a coin, Rich?” Meryl sounds both fragile and husky at the same time.

Richard thumps the keyboard panel. “You scared me, going quiet like that. What can you see?”

“We were right. I can see her. In fact, I’m standing on her.”

 

Oubliette by E. Catherine Tobler
illustrated by Wayne Haag 

In the space between the stars, Aphelion lingered.

Time did not exist within the ruined station, nor breath, nor heartbeat. Dehydration killed her long before hunger could plant its eager roots. Dehydration cracked her lips, fingertips, the soft skin between long toes. Dehydration withered nails and eyes, and caused arms to tingle as though a finger were pressed into a socket. Starvation crept second, to expand the desiccated cracks within lips, to allow fungi to blossom beneath the esophagus. Starvation consumed muscle and bone, peeling skin backward until stardust smothered exposed marrow.

 

Mind the Gap by Jennifer Dornan-Fish

Jo blew out a breath. “My gods, can’t you ever ask something simple?” But then she smiled at me. I understood she didn’t really want me to answer.

As always, I memorized her for the day. In descending order she smelled of coffee, scent free laundry soap, blood since she was menstruating, hair product, and also faintly like male semen which I assumed was from her boyfriend though it smelled slightly different than normal. There were seventy-two other detectable scents but they meant nothing to me. Short, thick black hair was mussed. Cropped leather jacket, white button up, slender turquoise necklace, tattered jeans over slightly damp black boots.

 

Features:

Editorial by Interzone's 2014 cover artist Wayne Haag

 

Future Interrupted by Jonathan McCalmont

The Origins of Science Fictional Inequality It is in the nature of science fiction to reimagine its history at least once every generation. Previous understandings of genre history emphasised science fiction’s increasing literary sophistication or its growing scientific accuracy but the current paradigm emphasises its growing diversity and the need to overcome a history of institutionalised sexism, racism and homophobia.

 

Time Pieces by Nina Allan

Coming up for Air Browsing reviews of new fiction, as I regularly do, I felt encouraged to read the online preview of Samantha Harvey’s new novel of friendship and enmity, Dear Thief. The opening chapter is stunning – the kind of writing that forces you to re-evaluate your whole enterprise. Eager to discover more about Harvey, I checked out her blog, and discovered there a fascinating piece she wrote earlier this year entitled ‘Writing to…write?’ in which she warns of an increasing tendency among new writers to pursue the goal of publication at all costs, sometimes jettisoning the ideals and impulses that led them into writing in the first place. “There has to be a reason for it all beyond validation and winning,” says Harvey, “and that reason has to be a kind of love for the process.” I enjoyed her insights, which reminded me of an article I read in The Guardian earlier in the month, reporting on comments made by Nobel judge Horace Engdahl bemoaning the proliferation of creative writing courses and the ‘curse of professionalism’ among Western writers today: “These novelists, who are often educated in European or American universities, don’t transgress anything because the limits which they have determined as being necessary to cross don’t exist.”

 

Ansible Link by David Langford

News and obituaries

 

Book Zone by Paul F. Cockburn, Elaine Gallagher, Andy Hedgecock, Paul Kincaid, Barbara Melville, Jack Deighton, Duncan Lunan, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Ian Hunter, Jo L. Walton, Stephen Theaker, Matthew S. Dent

Book reviews including: The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi (plus author interview); The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit (UK title The Year of the Ladybird) by Graham Joyce;Graham Joyce (1954–2014): writer, teacher, socialist, greencoat and explorer of the liminal, a chubster's appreciation by Andy Hedgecock; My Real Children by Jo Walton; Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch; Bête by Adam Roberts; Chain of Events by Fredrik T. Olsson; The Fourth Gwenevere by John James; The Relic Guild by Edward Cox; The Peripheral by William Gibson; Mind Seed edited by David Gullen & Gary Couzens; Black and Brown Planets edited by Isiah Lavender III; Scruffians by Hal Duncan; Rhapsody by Hal Duncan

 

Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe

Cinema releases including Predestination, Radio Free Albemuth, I Origins, Life After Beth, The Book of Life, If I Stay, The Giver, The Maze Runner, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dracula Untold, The Boxtrolls, The Babadook, Extraterrestrial, The Signal

 

Laser Fodder by Tony Lee

DVD and Blu-ray reviews including Bones Season 9, Space Station 76, Kite, Red Shift, Filmed in Supermarionation, Godzilla, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, Debug, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Out of the Unknown

 

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