Issue 212 passes New Worlds' record run, and has a guest editorial from Paul Raven, and fiction by Douglas Elliott Cohen, Gareth Lyn Powell, Will McIntosh and Tim Akers.
With a cover by Osvaldo Gonzalez, the September / October 2007 issue sees Interzone pull away from New World's record of 24 years regular magazine appearances, although correspondent Alan Dorey has different views, including the paperbacks in his total.
IZ 212 starts with a guest editorial from new reviews editor Paul Raven, in which he lays out his policy: “I’m going to shamelessly paraphrase Paul Kincaid, one of the team of superb writers I have inherited: A book review should be honest, defensible, and well written.” A good philosophy, and it will be interesting to see how the reviews department evolves.
‘Feelings of the Flesh’ by Douglas Elliott Cohen starts out like a spaghetti western fantasy, but has a scientific enough underpinning that it can be counted as SF. Aberrates have evolved the ability to feed on one of their victim’s senses, leaving them bereft of the stolen sense. Human bounty hunters have taken to eliminating the Aberrates in turn. One such bounty hunter rescues a woman with an uncanny resemblance to his lost love, and knows that it is no coincidence. With one caveat – that the Aberrates’ ability to strip precisely one sense is a little too neat; why not some able to feed upon two or even three? – its a neat premise, has good characterization, and leads to an unexpected conclusion. Highly recommended.
Even better is Gareth Lyn Powell’s “Ack-Ack Macaque,” a splendidly loony story about lovers separated by a villainous marketer, and an anime monkey who lives on a giant airship and engages German biplanes in aerial combat over France. It has pertinent things to say about the Disneyfication of art that will speak directly to fans of Winnie the Pooh and Paddington amongst others, and while all of its individual tropes have been used before, its sheer charm carries it through.
Sadly, not everything that appears in Interzone will be to everyone’s taste, and the less said about ‘A Handful of Pearls’ by Beth Bernobich the better, but the reader is owed some explanation; while it has some nice individual turns of phrase, it’s inadequately set, poorly plotted and leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
Will McIntosh’s wonderful “Dada Jihad” takes place in a near-future America very much like today’s but more so, where the population is polarized between the haves and have-nots, while radical anarchists spread mayhem at will; Ange is less concerned about changing society than in impressing her family by becoming a PhD. Her friends Chair and Rami accuse her of being a, “Believer in the cause, but afraid to make too much of a commitment lest it tarnish her career.”
Finally Tim Akers gives the IZ subscriber another Veridon story with “The Algorithm.” Akers is able to merge fantasy and SF in a way reminiscent of some vintage Jack Vance, but there’s a darker edge to his work than the master, and the exotic locales are less important to the story. In this piece, scavenger priests recover pieces of a giant timepiece floating down from the mountains in the rivers, when one of their number finds an unexpected complication in one of the vessels.
Interzone concludes with the wealth of reviews, and the Bernobich notwithstanding, four outstanding stories has the TTA team raising the bar still further for future issues.
