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Interzone Issue 216 from TTA PressMay - June 2008; the Mundane SF Special Guest Edited by Geoff Ryman
Chelsea Quinn Yabro, Lavie Tidhar and Ryman himself contribute, interviews with Greg Egan and Alastair Reynolds, Book and Film reviews from Nick Lowe John Clute et al
With this issue Interzone has been taken over by proponents of the Mundane SF Movement such as Guest Editor Geoff Ryman, Israeli author Lavie Tidhar, Canadian Elizabeth Vonarburg and veteran Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. There are the usual departments, and interviews with Alastair Reynolds, and Greg Egan. Mundane SFMundane SF is a fairly recent movement within SF. Guest Editor Geoff Ryman outlined the definition of a Mundane story as being • no FasterThanLight travel/ communications • no aliens • no time travel • no parallel universes • no immortality or telepathy These SF 'inventions' are powerful myths whose presence may be drowning out some important ideas. Throw these babies out of the bathwater and see if there is life besides. This seems reminiscent of the 1970s trends of stories to be 'relevant' to contemporary issues. By throwing open an issue to the Mundanes, Interzone's editorial team have once again demonstrated their ability to promote their magazine creatively. The opening story, Lavie Tidhar's 'How To Make Paper Airplanes' is something of a disappointment. It isn't helped by the fragmented nature of the narrative, which seems to owe a debt to Moorcock's New Worlds Cornelius stories (albeit the fragments are more directly linked than Moorcock's newspaper clippings), but it never really engages and only hovers on the borderline of SF. More Mimetic than Mundane. By contrast 'Endra — From Memory' by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro reads more like fantasy initially, but little clues like little blocks of plastic reveal that this is After The Fall SF in which a female captain searches for a mythical lost city, against a backdrop of lands swallowed by the still-rising water. It's beautifully written, and poignant, but were it not for the solidly-grounded setting, it could as easily be fantasy. The issue only really gets going with Billie Aul's 'The Hour Is Getting Late.' A virtual-Woodstock re-enactment features a guest appearance by a virt(ual)-art superstar publicly begging his estranged girlfriend for a second chance. Behind the love-in of the VR concert, the poor are burning down the barricades, and she knows that if she doesn't give the right answer, she could become one of them. Most Interzone stories draw their energy from two or more disparate ideas being slammed together like the U-235 in early atomic bombs. 'Remote Control' by R.R. Angell is the first story that does this, concatenating border immigration politics, arcade games, and privatized public services in a dark story that somehow ends on a hopeful note. Élisabeth Vonarburg's ' The Invisibles' is another story that plays with narrative, and perhaps because of its Francophone origins, actually feels more like the future (albeit a very retro future) than almost any other story in the issue. One by one commuters who have lost all hope begin to find their automated journeys going awry, with unexpected consequences. 'Into The Night' by Anil Menon charts the journey of an aging Indian to his daughter's Melanesian home. It's well drawn, and suitably futuristic, but like several of the others, there's less plot than characterization. Geoff RymanTalk Is Cheap by Geoff Ryman is the strongest story in the issue; in the future we've learned to directly photo-synthesize sugars from sunlight and food shortages have been consigned to history-- but humanity still needs water, and it's up to the Walkers to check that water reserves on the maps are actually there. Ryman shows that even in Utopia, the human heart will still be capable of frailty. Highly recommended. Four good stories, and three of varying quality; there's less word count and more stories than in most issues (an estimated five thousand each this time, versus a standard average of six to seven thousand) which doesn't help the cause. Put it down to a worthwhile experiment, Interzone, but one that highlights the paucity of a Mundane-only diet. However good the individual stories, collectively, reading the issue was like an Atkins diet of the mind -- the reader longed for some Faster Than Light Travel, or an occasional alien.
The copyright of the article Interzone Issue 216 from TTA Press in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Interzone Issue 216 from TTA Press in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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