The January 2009 Interzone (TTA Press, ISSN9770 264 359 206, 68pp) starts Britain's leading SF magazine with the usual columns by David Langford and others detailed below.
Jason Stoddard
Jason Stoddard returns with his first story for a year with 'Monetized.' It's several years after the Big Collapse, when most of the population no longer work, but instead earn money through social networking and referring individuals to sellers. When the son of a major social networking guru visits a concealed warehouse he stumbles across a secret operation that suddenly makes him very interesting to all kinds of people -- some of whom he doesn't want to be interesting to. Highly recommended.
'Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast' by Eugie Foster is set in a future society where individuals have been stripped of much of their identity, and take it instead from masks assigned them by craftsmen under orders from the queen which are implanted with devices which "stimulate thoughts, trigger emotions, assign personality traits." It's disconcerting and thought-provoking in equal measure and should rightly earn its author wider exposure -and perhaps appearances in the Year's Best and on various award ballots.
Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker's 'After Everything Woke Up' is even stranger than the usual Rucker offerings, perhaps because of its tone, which has something of the naivete of a fairy-tale or a fable. Set on an Earth where everything --from animals through plants to the very stones and places-- has self-aware, it has little by way of a plot. That may be due to the fact that it's an extract from Rucker's novel in progress, Hylozoic.
This review will probably be longer than 'Spy vs Spy' by Neil Williamson, a beautifully crafted little piece that --like the Stoddard-- touches on social networking. It's a wickedly funny satire about the lengths that obsession will drive near-neighbours to in their mutual vendetta, and the folly of escalation -- a subject that overlaps with the long-running MAD cartoon of the same name.
Leah Bobet's 'Miles to Isengard' is a taut near-future thriller about a group of terrorists driving a nuclear bomb through backwoods USA while trying to evade capture by the Security Services. Written from the perspective of one of the bombers, they are nonetheless depicted sympathetically, while the regime they are striking back against are accused of using children as walking bombs, "Run 'em in ahead of a line. Once the enemy fills 'em with bullets their heart stops, they explode." (p36)
Gareth L Powell'Memory Dust' by Gareth L. Powell is a much more sombre story than Powell's last appearance -- the 2007 poll-winning Ack-Ack Macaque-- and shares its setting with Six Lights Off Green Scar in Powell's collection The Last Reef. Caesar is one of a group of pilots who take their small, reinforced ships into hyperspace -- the twist being that the co-ordinates are set randomly; the ship may emerge safely, or in the heart of a supernova. Caesar's last flight is to return a quiescent creature to its home planet, but its behaviour changes abruptly.
Book Zone
The books reviews section has an interview with Jeffrey Ford, as well as a review of his Well-Built City Trilogy, and a feature on Christopher Priest. Tony Lee also contributes a book review, as well as flaying the latest DVDs.
 |
