Interzone is celebrating it's 25th anniversary - again. And rightly so; they have plenty to celebrate. The magazine has groomed a whole generation of British writers.
Interzone is celebrating it's 25th anniversary - again. And rightly so; they have plenty to celebrate. The magazine has groomed a generation of British writers. Hugo-winning Charles Stross, Nebula Award-winning Nicola Griffith and Hugo and Nebula nominated Stephen Baxter are three of the writers gained exposure in their early years through the magazine.
But in the last years of David Pringle's editorship the magazine started to drift badly, an issue that new owners TTA Press addressed, first in the contents, then in the magazine's look.
Three years after changing hands, the revitalized Interzone is no longer viewing the American digest-sized print-SF magazines like Analog and Asimovs as it's competitors, but is going head-to-head in UK newsagents with glossy media-oriented magazines like Imagine FX and Death Ray, and it's intensely visual look reflects this.
Issue 210 is the third issue to celebrate the magazine's 25th birthday, and is a perfect snapshot of the magazine as it stands in mid-2007.
Unusually, all the artwork is by one artist, Doug Sirois, and he has provided an interesting mix of illustrations to accompany the stories.
But to the contents:
One of the complaints from old Interzone fans is the dearth of British contributors, and this is writ large in the fiction contents for 210 -- at most one of the contributors is from the UK (there is a certain ambiguity in Tim Lees' biography).
This poses a predicament for the editors: with the rise of e-mail, it is much easier for Britons to submit to US magazines, but conversely, the same works in reverse, and there are many more Americans than Brits. To impose an arbitrary quota would mean setting artificial constrainst on the quality of the stories, and would be unlikely to be for the better.
'The Final Voyage of La Riaza' by Jayme Lynn Blaschke is a sort of steampunk (pirate-punk?) story of airships sailing between worlds, brigands and murder and revenge. It part of a series and with Spanish mingling with magical and/or pseudo-scientific creatures like gigapedes, there's too little information to make sense -- it's stripped down story-telling stripped down too far.
Rachel Swirsky's 'Heartstrung' is a sweet, tender story which makes a metaphor literal -- in this case, wearing one's heart on one's sleeve is a fundamental part of Swirsky's imaginary world.
'Tearing Down Tuesday' by Steven Francis Murphy revisits territory staked out by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s, but does so with an early twenty-first century sensibility to good effect.
David Ira Cleary's 'Doctor Abernathy's Dream Theatre' never really seems to decide what it wants to be about, and is perhaps the weakest story in the whole issue.
'Preachers' by Tim Lees is barely SF at all, were it not for the post-apocalyptic setting, and is really more of a character study by an author who has previously appeared in the 3rd Alternative, Interzone's sister magazine.
Tim Aker's 'Toke' is the last story in the magazine, and is one of the most interesting, one of his Veridon stories, set in the same milieu as 'Distro' from Interzone 206 last year.
The non-fiction is often at least as interesting as the stories, and as well as the usual mix of book and film reviews by such luminaries as Nick Lowe and John Clute, there are David Langford's regular Anisble Link (a gossip column for the sf world), interviews with cover artist Sirois and Steph Swainston, and an autobiographical essay by Harlan Ellison on his relationship with legendary author Theodore Sturgeon, a contemporary and fellow writer of screenplays for the original Star Trek.
