Jason Stoddard, whose story “Monetized” opens issue #220 of Interzone, seems to have decided that the primary purpose of science fiction (or, at least, his science fiction) is to provide some sort of ideological and economic underpinning for the wilder predictions about the network economy. His speculations are overwhelmingly concerned with demonstrating how “everything is different now!”

I have no problem with fiction written with a strong point of view or with an author willing to work to an explicit political agenda. Actually, I much prefer fiction that is politically engaged. But sometimes Stoddard strays over that line where plot and character takes second place to preaching, and the pleasures of storytelling are subsumed beneath somewhat didactic prose.

That’s not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had from Stoddard’s work. I’ve enjoyed “Far Horizons” and the Mars stories that have appeared in previous issues of Interzone and his work in Futurismic. But “Monetized” is less successful than his other efforts—partly because it lacks a compelling story and partly because there’s a sense that we’ve seen him tread this speculative ground before.

“Monetized”’s plot, such as it is, has Mike, a spoilt rich kid, whining about his mother’s wealth making his life difficult in a post-crunch world where “word of mouth” advertising has become the primary source of income for many, and the key driver of the economy. Mike discovers that his mother is caught up in a plot to introduce nanotech manufacturing that could plunge the economy into chaos again and finds himself caught between crooks and government stooges seeking to exploit the information. Mike finds a way out, but there’s no imminent sense of danger, and what’s at stake in the story seems ill-defined and distant.

The fact that the central character is permanently semidetached from the world around him is a fundamental problem, but there’s also a sense that this future—with the constantly nagging advertising and heavy use of brand names—is becoming overworked. And perhaps, and I have a similar problem with David Louis Edelman’s novel Infoquake, I just can’t get over the idea that all the tech-savvy people in these futures can’t find themselves the technological equivalent of a pop-up blocker to shut out the advertising they’re always complaining about.

The second story in Interzone is the altogether stranger and more difficultly titled “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” (hereafter referred to as the Mask Story) by Eugie Foster*. It takes place in an alien world where individuals play different roles each day, depending on the masks they put on each morning. A marigold mask sees the central character become a murder victim resurrected the next day to wear a blue mask and live the life of a giggling maiden; in a black mask, he copulates ferociously with his queen; and in an orange mask, the flesh is stripped from his bones. The Mask Story switchbacks and twists beneath the reader, but just when a recognisable plot emerges—Pena arrives to guide the central character to the truth about what the masks are and how they were created, and we think we can see where the story must be going—it shrugs us off once more and takes another, even darker turn. Is it possible that some things are better left hidden behind masks?

Foster’s story might not take the reader where they expect to go, but it’s a heady journey nonetheless, encompassing sex and death, and it is told in an accomplished manner. The Mask Story is not perfect—the second half is a little too heavy on exposition, and the uncovering of a secret of such shattering importance is a little too easily achieved—but this is, nonetheless, powerful stuff.

It says something about my expectations of Rudy Rucker’s work that a story in which humans have become able to communicate with every rock, stream, tree, and shrub seems almost disappointingly ordinary. That said, Rucker’s a class act, and “After Everything Woke Up” has more than enough to compensate the reader for putting aside the time to read it. Jayjay and Thuy live in a world where everything and everyone is connected and have set out to build themselves an ideal home in the woods using only the enhanced power of their minds.

This is an excerpt from Rucker’s next novel, Hylozoic, and like many novel extracts published as short stories, it suffers from lacking a real dilemma at its heart: Jayjay and Thuy have a tiff with the spirit of a pool, but everything ends amicably. Nonetheless, there’s enough gentle wit (the grumpy pool Gloob, chirpy little Camber) and interesting possibilities opened up here to have one speculating what a fabulist like Rucker might do with the wider world, given this starting premise.

Neil Williamson’s “Spy Vs Spy” is a very brief and very dark look at what might happen if the tools of the surveillance society were to come home to roost. Two neighbours have become obsessed with watching each other and are engaged in a technological arms race that can only end in one way. There’s a disturbing core to this story that is very neatly leavened by the cartoonish use of technology—all of which is supplied by Wile E. Coyote’s favourite source of half-arsed gimmickry, ACME. “Spy Vs Spy” left me chuckling.

Sometimes I read a story that I just don’t like and I feel guilty about it, because I feel as though I should. That pretty much sums up my attitude to Leah Bobet’s “Miles to Isengard.” I feel that Bobet is trying very hard to say something interesting and to address some important point; the story has a portentous edge-of-the-apocalypse setting, the characters seem to be stretching for some sort of archetypal stature (the innocent child, the conflicted hero, and the serpent-like talking weapon), and her characters’ mission—to destroy an atomic bomb—seems as though it should feel powerfully worthy. But the more I read “Miles to Isengard,” the less I like it. The Tolkien reference in the title sets my teeth on edge. There’s no clear sense of why these people are in this situation. There’s no convincing explanation of what has driven them to this drastic act or how they might have carried it out—they’re an unlikely bunch of atomic bomb thieves. And there’s no real clue as to what they hope their act will achieve. What we actually have, then, is a group of variously broken and somewhat annoying characters stuck on a journey we don’t really understand, so that by the end, it’s just a pleasure to be rid of them. The characters live in fear of discovery and of the adversaries in pursuit of them. But their pursuers never make an appearance, and there seem to be remarkably few obstacles in their path—certainly not enough to justify the extreme histrionics and ratcheted-up paranoia that infects them.

Reading and re-reading the story—especially the mushy and confused ending—doesn’t help. “Bombs are bad” is the message I suppose it is trying to tell us, and governments who make bombs instead of looking after children are bad too. And as a paid-up member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I’m not going to argue with that sentiment, but even I’m wondering if the same message hasn’t been delivered more effectively by countless other SF stories that were able to do it without resorting to a chunk of Sesame Street-style exposition in the final act to give us the moral of their tale.

The final story in this issue is the one I’d been anticipating most keenly: Gareth L Powell’s “Memory Dust.” I have enjoyed pretty much every story I’ve read by Powell—”The Last Reef” and “Ack-Ack Macaque” have been highlights in Interzone’s recent run, and his collection of short stories (The Last Reef and Other Stories, published by Elastic Press) was one of my favourite books of last year.

So I was disappointed to find “Memory Dust” slightly disappointing. It’s not that it’s a bad story; it just didn’t deliver what I expected. One problem is the use of elements that felt overly familiar: the jaded pilot on one last mission driven by dreams of a distant planet, the mysterious crumbling alien city, even the threat of the “memory dust,” and the alien creatures absorbing human personalities into a hive mind felt a little too much like a nanotech version of the Borg or a million similar aliens. But I could forgive these familiar elements, especially in a story that zips along as compactly and smartly as this one.

The main problem comes not from the science fictional aspects or the plot but from the human interactions, which is particularly surprising because (perhaps unusually for a science fiction writer) Powell has elsewhere displayed a real knack for the realistic depiction of complex human relationships in neatly compressed flourishes. Here, however, the central character has two key relationships—with his daughter and with his lover (and co-pilot), Maya. The story requires Caesar to say goodbye to both of them forever and yet neither relationship is given enough depth for us to feel the emotional wrench that must surely make both tasks immensely painful. Caesar’s last words in the story are: “Nothing lasts.” But if he’s such a cold fish that he can cast his previous life off with a stoical shrug, then it’s hard to see why the reader should care for his predicament. It also makes it difficult to explain his determined struggle not to succumb to the dust—which will, of course, outlast him and everything he knows.

There remain elements of “Memory Dust” to enjoy; Powell’s deft touch with action sequences hasn’t deserted him. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I had hoped for more from this story.

Overall, this is another fine package from Interzone. A really strong piece of art by Adam Tredowski has been sympathetically and strikingly turned into a cover by Interzone’s designers, and there’s the usual, excellent collection of nonfiction: David Langford’s Ansible, a good selection of book reviews, Tony Lee’s DVD column, and Nick Lowe’s erudite film reviews. Add to that fiction which, for the most part, hovers between the very good (even when flawed) and the excellent, and this is another rewarding issue of the UK’s longest running SF magazine.

[*Disclosure notice: Eugie Foster is the editor of The Fix, which is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Interzone.]