Interzone

Buy this issue or subscribe and get it free by using "IZ273 FREE" as your Shopper Reference during checkout.

 

Cover

417h3r105 v6 by 2017 cover artist Dave Senecal

 

Contents

 

Fiction

Looking for Laika by Laura Mauro
illustrated by Richard Wagner

I. Two Suns in the Sunset

“There are footprints on the moon,” Grandad says.

The sea air tastes bloody in the back of Pete’s throat. The shingle clatters and shifts underfoot, conspiring to turn ankles. The moon hangs low in the sky, fat and proud, a globule of milk suspended in time.

 

After the Titans by Rachael Cupp
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Now, the-sky-our-father is dead. He is a fixed skin, rolled across the ball of the world, the other light spilling through his numberless tiny wounds. But oldmother remembers when he was still alive. When the-sky-our-father was living, she says, he would lighten and darken only according to his humors, driving all the beasts and trees and mortals mad with this uncertainty. She says, sometimes the-sky-our-father would weep, and then liquid droplets of black night and stars would fall in flashing streams, to catch in the shallow basins on the rocks of high mountains. The tears of the-sky-our-father, if drunk, would fill a mortal with a wild, clear light that made of them great poets, or witless, moaning beasts, oldmother says, and whether or not she ever drank any of these tears, whether or not the wild, clear light carried along into the blood of her children, whether or not this made of us poets or witless is anyone’s guess.

 

Fully Automated Nostalgia Capitalism by Dan Grace

“Those fries won’t fry themselves.”

I nod. I find it easier not to say too much. My boss is the typical character. A thin skin of hyper-enthusiasm stretched tight over a bitter black chasm of self-loathing. Whoever he really is, he plays the part well.

The thing is these fries would fry themselves.

 

The Big So-So by Erica L. Satifka
illustrated by Vincent Sammy 

We’re both sitting on the rotting front porch one muggy July day when Dorcas asks me if I want to break into Paradise with her. I lace up my sneakers and we do the old huff-and-puff up Negley Avenue to the big Cygnian compound on the hill.

 

The Garden of Eating by R. Boyczuk
illustrated by Martin Hanford

Deep in the ruined city, near enough to catch glimpses of the sea, and well beyond the range of Tutor’s Dragonfly, Boy had found an opening where there had been none before. A single concrete block had fallen in near the base of the wall, leaving a space barely wider than Boy’s shoulders. He was on his hands and knees, peering through the hole, and he breathed through his mouth as he had been taught, silently, each breath raising a tiny cloud of dust that rose then settled, rose then settled. Some drifted backwards and tickled his nose; he fought an urge to sneeze.

 

2017 James White Award Winner:
The Morrigan by Stewart Horn

The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. The winning story receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in Interzone.

 

Black Static 61 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 61 contains new dark fiction by Georgina Bruce, Ralph Robert Moore, Carly Holmes, Andrew Humphrey, Mel Kassel, and Ruth EJ Booth. The cover art is by Tara Bush, and interior illustrations by Joachim Luetke, Vince Haig, and George C. Cotronis. Regular features include Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker, Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore, Case Notes by Peter Tennant (book reviews), Blood Spectrum by Gary Couzens (film reviews). To take out a discounted subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please visit this website's shop.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

New subscribers can get this issue free by using "BS61 FREE" as your Shopper's Reference during checkout. The same offer applies to Interzone (use "IZ273 FREE") and a dual subscription to both magazines (use "IZ273 + BS61 FREE").

 

Interface

Editorial
Erica L. Satifka

Future Interrupted: Genre Culture from Below
Jonathan McCalmont

Things in the world of science fiction tend to go rather quiet after the summer. Professionals would doubtless explain this deafening silence in terms of the genre publishing industry’s annual cycle of hype, award, and nomination: Early in the year, nominations open for the annual Hugo awards, prompting professionals to start listing their eligible works and gently reminding their followers to get out the vote. As the year deepens, the requests for nomination grow more strident and people start trying to set up networks of mutual recommendation.

 

Time Pieces: An Autumn Journey
Nina Allan

Shortly after we met, Chris and I had one of those conversations about movies in which you end up listing your favourite science fiction films from one to ten. Such lists mutate and change almost as rapidly as our tastes develop – indeed the main point in compiling such lists might be said to reside in the wry amusement we feel when we happen to stumble across them unexpectedly years later. What kind of time-traveller’s joke is it that enables you to discover that in 1989 your favourite SFF movie of all time was in fact the 1976 King Kong?

 

Ansible Link
David Langford

News, obituaries.

 

Reviews

Book Zone
Maureen Kincaid Speller, Andy Hedgecock, Lawrence Osborn, Juliet E. McKenna, Jack Deighton, Stephen Theaker, Ian Hunter

Books reviewed include Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, 2084 edited by George Sandison, Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee, Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan, A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge, Provenance by Ann Leckie, Blue Shift by Jane O’Reilly, The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams: Volume 1, Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng, The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include Blade Runner 2049, It, Flatliners, Happy Death Day, mother!, Thor: Ragnarok, The Ritual, Geostorm, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The Lego Ninjago Movie

 

How To Buy Interzone

Interzone is available in good shops in the UK and many other countries around the world, including the USA where it is stocked by Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and elsewhere. If your local store (in any country) doesn't stock the magazine they should easily be able to order it for you so please don't hesitate to ask them. You can also buy the magazine from a variety of online retailers, or a version for e-readers from places like Weightless Books, Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, etc.

The best thing though is to follow any of the Shop/Buy Now/Subscribe links on this website and buy this new issue (scroll down to the bottom of the Shop), or better still take out a subscription (at the top of the Shop), direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue. Magazines like Interzone cannot survive without subscriptions, so thanks for your support.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers can get this issue free by using "IZ273 FREE" as their Shopper's Reference during checkout.

 

Please Help Spread the Word

Magazines like Interzone cannot survive without subscriptions, and we always need more. If you enjoy the magazine please blog about it, review it, or simply recommend it to your friends. Thank you!

 

The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery

Interzone readers will be interested to know that TTA Novella 4, The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery, is out now as a B-Format paperback with wraparound cover art by Richard Wagner and bonus connected short story. You can buy it now from this website's shop.

"The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It's quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving" Gary McMahon

"Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie" Nicholas Royle

"Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process - to Art with a capital A - as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz. I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr Avery pens next. I'll be listening" T.E. Grau

"A monumentally haunting novella" Des Lewis

“Simon Avery’s descriptions of Krysztina’s music makes me want to hear it. It’s a subtle and beautifully told tale with echoes of European film-makers like Haneke and Kieslowski, as well as their predecessors like Franju and Polanski. It conjures a powerful sense of foreboding that reminds me of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and shares with that film a sense of being haunted. It has moments of profound sadness and yet still managed to surprise me with its uplifting ending. One of the novellas of the year” Mike O'Driscoll

“A dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian backdrop. The reconnection between father and daughter gives The Teardrop Method melancholy in light of the father’s declining health, and the handling of the supernatural element is done so latently it feels authentic and genuinely spooky. The prose is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page” Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

“A quintessential TTA novella: horror with a vein of oddness that runs through it; a strange story where the protagonist hears the song that precedes a person’s death. With vivid descriptions of Budapest, it all helps to create a wholly believable narrative. Recommended, especially if you’re a fan of Dario Argento” Christopher Teague