Interzone 222 Reviewed
The May-June Issue of Britain's Leading SF Magazine From TTA Press
Jun 11, 2009
Interzone 222 sees debuts from Kim Lakin-Smith, Tim Pratt, Sean McMullen and Sarah L. Edwards, and the return of regular contributor Aliette de Bodard, and Nina Allan.
Imagine West Side Story transplanted to Gotham City's outer suburbs, then add in a hint of retro-SF with fliers using glider-wings and steam-powered jet-packs and the reader will get a flavouring of Kim Lakin-Smith's 'Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married' which opens the fiction. Lakin-Smith's prose is stark, black-and-white and very, very good. Recommended.
Tim Pratt
In 'Unexpected Outcomes' by Hugo Award-winning debutant Tim Pratt, as the planes fly into the Twin Towers they halt in mid-air. A man appears in the narrator's house to tell them that human history has been a simulation, and that the experimenters are terminating the experiment. People will live on, but will no longer be able to have children, have no need to eat, and the weather will remain as it is at the time of termination. But as the narrator's friend Boone points out, "There's something else going on here." A marvelous, multi-layered look at several SF staples in one story, it's outstanding and should feature in various editions of the Year's Best lists.
By contrast, 'Lady of the White-Spired City' by Sarah L. Edwards takes another SF staple – that of the interstellar voyager returning centuries later – but doesn't really go anywhere new with it. While Lakin-Smith's verve negates a similar charge, sadly Edwards' can't rise to such levels. Evriel Pashtan, emissary of the high regent of Alabaster revisits a world she abandoned when her husband died, to find out what happened to her daughter. It's not a bad story but it's below IZ's normally high standards.
Nina Allan's 'Microcosmos' is better, drawing in fine detail the sweltering reality of global warming as Melodie's parents take her to see the mysterious Lindsay Ballantine. It's never made explicit what the connection is between Ballantine and Melodie's Aunt Chantal, nor why Melodie's mother loathes the man as she does – instead Allan prefers sly allusions. Ballantine shows Melodie a paramecium under a microscope, and talks of being surrounded by invisible monsters, while Melodie's mother accuses Ballantine of performing 'foul experiments.' It's a story that's likely to polarize readers, but its very elusiveness is one of its delights.
Aliette de Bodard
In 'Ys' by Aliette de Bodard, science and magic co-exist uneasily, the science from the sonographs of Francoise's baby laid out by the obstetrician, the magic from Francoise and Gaetan's Breton incantation to summon Ahez, goddess of the sunken city of Ys. For the baby that Francoise carries is Ahez's and it is flawed. One of the delights of reading de Bodard is that sense of otherness, be it a Chinese legend re-worked, or a straight SF-nal alternate history like 'The Lost Xuyan Bride.' De Bodard is one of the candidates for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2008, and rightly so. Recommended.
Sean McMullen's 'Mother of Champions' survives a half-page insufficiently camouflaged info-dump early on, to become an entertaining meditation of our history being secretly guided by cheetahs, and that by messing around with DNA, humanity may be endangering itself. Cat fans – of which there many in SF – will love it, and for other readings it's well-told and quirky.
Apart from the fiction, there is a third consecutive wonderful Adam Tredowski cover, David Langford's Ansible Link, book reviews of Cosmocopia by Paul Di Filippo & Jim Woodring (with a review and interview by Peter Loftus), Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, The Accord by Keith Brooke and others, film reviews of Watchmen, and DVD reviews of The Day the Earth Stood Still, The X-Men Trilogy, Inkheart, and others.
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