Cutting-edge SF from Christopher Priest, Jason Stoddard and Mercurio D. Rivera, an interview with Iain Banks, Book and Film reviews from Nick Lowe John Clute and others
Interzone 214 is produced to the British SF magazine’s usual high standard – Interzone has been described by Gardner Dozois in the latest Year’s Best SF as ‘perhaps the best-looking SF magazine published today.’ Rightly so, and cover and internal artwork by Paul Drummond and Darren Winter contribute to this image.
Iain M. Banks -- The Culture
The magazine opens with an interview with Iain Banks. Author of The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Dead Air, Banks inserts a middle initial into his name, and as ‘Iain M. Banks’ writes the acclaimed Space Operas about The Culture. After eight years, Iain M. Banks new novel Matter marks a welcome return to the absurdly complex plots and baroque settings of The Culture.
The lead story is Jason Stoddard’s novella ‘Far Horizon,’ one of a series of stories set in the near future that features life under the rule of multi-national corporations that are de facto governments in their own right. However, rather than looking at short-term extrapolation, such as in ‘Winning Mars,’ Stoddard instead takes a much more visionary look at our future, in a story that has some of the scope and grandeur of Childhood’s End, albeit written with a healthy cynicism toward corporate politics, and a less roseate view of human nature than Arthur C. Clarke. This is one of those increasingly rare stories that reminds the jaded reader of why they started reading SF in the first place.
‘Pseudo Tokyo,’ by Jennifer Linnaea is an inventive look at an alternate future where jet-travel has been all-but banned in favour of Niven-esque matter transmitters, and a tourist on his annual vacation visits Tokyo; it’s when the tourist arrives that the alternate-ness of the future becomes clear. It’s a great story by a previously unfamiliar writer, who is clearly one to watch.
Christopher Priest
Christopher Priest returns to The Dream Archipelago in ‘The Trace of Him,’ in which a woman revisits the scene of a brief fling with a now-famous writer after his death. Priest tells a short, haunting piece with almost no plot, and which breaks just every piece of writing-advice laid down to beginners, and yet still achieves one of the most memorable stories of the last year. Welcome back, Mr. Priest.
Also featured is ‘The Faces of My Friends,’ the latest James White Award winner, by Jennifer Harwood-Smith. The prize is given to the best short-story by a non-professional writer, as determined by a panel of judges, as befits a prize named after one of Northern Ireland’s most acclaimed SF writers of the 1960s and 70s.
Mercurio D. Rivera returns with ‘The Scent of Their Arrival.’ Few writers in SF depict aliens quite as alien as Rivera does, as demonstrated in ‘Longing for Langalana,’ which won the Interzone Reader’s poll of 2006 for Best Story. This time an orbiting spaceship poses a mystery for aliens who communicate by scent rather than sound, in a genre-blurring story that ends IZ214 on a high note.
Nick Lowe
IZ214 seems to have a theme of absentees coming home; as well as Banks and Priest, this issue sees the long-awaited return of Nick Lowe, whose film column is almost worth the price of the magazine on its own. Readers may need to jam their fists in their mouths to avoid laughing-out loud at Lowe’s reminiscences of reviewing in long-ago 1985. John Clute leads the Book Reviews, although Paul Kincaid is more direct, and more interesting.
