Interzone

Cover

Abductees 4 by 2018 cover artist Vince Haig

 

Contents

 

Fiction

Inscribed on Dark Water by Gregor Hartmann
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Kneeling on a walkway between two photobioreactors, Olani lowered a hose into the sea and began to refill the tank strapped to her back. As the tank grew heavier she had to lean forward to balance. Closer to murky water that rippled as vibrations from her movement attracted creatures from the depths.

 

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

The timber sailing boat lists hard to port and Tadi and Armin duck to avoid the boom as it whips toward the water. The spar bangs into place, splashing up sunwarmed drops that speckle Tadi’s shins with citrines of late afternoon light. Luckily the sail is furled. Had it been erect, the gusty breeze would have slam-dunked the sailcloth right into the drink and all four of them would be heads bobbing in the bay by now, their nets, lines and caneblades and all of their flexigum salvage drifting down and away toward the seafloor.

 

The Analogue of Empathy by Joanna Berry
illustrated by Vincent Sammy 

01

Reinitialisation, discourses and meditation, rejuvenation treatment 734, simulated forgetfulness seminar, experimentation period until rejuvenation treatment 735, discourses, end of line.

Subliminal command line login s.harris.ral.ac.uk: Let's try this again tomorrow.

 

Territory: Blank by Aliya Whiteley 

Day 156

Watkin has also been eaten.

The question I find myself unable to answer is – will I miss him? Time must pass before I know whether it is a relief to be free of his incessant optimism. Now I can descend into depressed apathy or even barbarism, if I so wish, for as long as I continue to last. He will chivvy me no more. Play along now, Michaels! he would say. I find I can no longer despise that phrase with impunity; it must become tinged with regret and nostalgia. For better days? That remains to be seen.

 

Singles' Day by Samantha Murray
illustrated by Richard Wagner

Yu Yan
Hangzhou, China

If you timed it right, West Lake could sometimes almost approach a feeling of solitude. It was a very popular destination, both with tourists and locals, lovers and families and groups arriving by the busload; but after the restaurants were closing, with the sun dropped behind the horizon, on the eve of Singles’ Day, where most preferred the immersive shopping experience they could find in their own homes, you could imagine what it was like to not live in a city of so many million people, on a planet that groaned under the weight of nearly eleven billion. You could breathe.

 

Black Static 65 Out Now

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 65 contains new dark fiction by Ian Muneshwar, Timothy Mudie, E. Catherine Tobler, Kailee Pedersen, Matt Thompson, Carole Johnstone & Chris Kelso, and Cody Goodfellow. The cover art is 'Dream On' by Joachim Luetke, and interior illustrations by Joachim Luetke, Vincent Sammy, Warwick Fraser-Coombe, Dave Senecal, and Richard Wagner. Regular features: Notes From the Borderland by Lynda E. Rucker; Into the Woods by Ralph Robert Moore; Case Notes book reviews by Nina Allan (including interview with Catriona Ward), Georgina Bruce (including interview with Carly Holmes), Mike O'Driscoll, Daniel Carpenter, Laura Mauro, and David Surface's 'One Good Story'; Blood Spectrum film reviews by Gary Couzens. To take out a discounted subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please visit this website's Shop. 10% off all orders during September with the code SEP10.

 

Interface

Guest Editiral
Aliya Whiteley 

 

Future Interrupted: Smart Dildos, Cosy Delusions
Andy Hedgecock

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.

 

Time Pieces: Onwards and Upwards
Nina Allan

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.

 

Ansible Link
David Langford

News, obituaries.

 

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

 

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 click on the Shop button above or the link below and buy this new issue or subscribe direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue.

The TTA Shop is currently offering a 10% discount on all orders throughout September with the code SEP10.

 

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

Shortlisted for a 2018 World Fantasy Award

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 the TTA 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

“Majestic and compelling throughout, The Teardrop Method is an exemplary specimen of a standout novella. It’s beautifully written, excellently produced, and a sign of publisher TTA Press at the top of their game” Gareth Jones, Dread Central

"I can honestly say that Simon Avery's The Teardrop Method is one of the finest and most fascinating novellas I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I highly recommend this novella to speculative fiction readers, because it's a beautiful and subtly complex exploration of death, love, loss and how to recover from a tragedy. Its darkly beautiful atmosphere and delicate story will captivate everyone who appreciates quiet horror" Rising Shadow

"The Teardrop Method is a complex, intricately structured piece of dark fiction, or perhaps quite horror. It is a story about the weaving of stories, about the transmutation of the darkest personal grief into art, and about the coming to terms with the inevitability of death. As a key line puts it – Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself" Gary Dalkin, Amazing Stories

"Simon Avery’s prose is spare and masterly, and certainly the equal of any Booker Prize nominee I’ve ever read. As much goes on between the lines as on them. The interstitial dark spaces are filled with horrors and a creeping unease that drags the reader in and won’t let go. The characterisation and storytelling, too, are brilliant" John Dodds, Amazing Stories

"This highly original piece is written with the sad, chilly atmosphere of much central European fiction but it has a very British rejection of miserabilism for its own sake. The desire for even the most fantastical stories to make sense and to make progress keeps breaking through and the result is a charming, and charmingly odd, novella which stays in the mind like an overheard song" Mat Coward, Morning Star

"Avery's story is a dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian back drop. 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 hence, genuinely spooky. The prose here is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page" Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

 

Crimewave 13: Bad Light

Interzone readers might also like to know that a new volume of Crimewave is available now. This 240-page American Royal paperback contains groundbreaking and often genre-bending new stories by Simon Bestwick, Gerri Brightwell, Georgina Bruce, Ray Cluley, Mat Coward, Catherine Donnelly, Stephen Hargadon, Andrew Hook, Linda Mannheim, Ralph Robert Moore, Mike O'Driscoll, Steve Rasnic Tem and others, with wraparound cover art by Ben Baldwin. It's only £10 and available from the TTA Shop now.

“One of the very best anthologies I have ever read, in any genre. An absolute gem” Tim Lees