Interzone 231 is Britain's leading SF magazine; last year's Nebula Award winning novelette first appeared in these pages. The last edition of 2010 has the sixth and final image of Warwick Fraser-Coombe's epic painting 'Playground: Hide and Seek,' and is a special devoted to Jason Sanford.
Matthew Cook opens the fiction with 'The Shoe Factory,' in which an astronaut trying to repair his crippled spaceship keeps flashing back to his youth, spent sheltering in a derelict Chinese factory with his lover. The dislocation of the narrative is finally resolved with a poignant ending, marking a very promising beginning.
Aliette de Bodard
Regular contributor Aliette de Bodard returns with 'Shipbuilder,' extending her Xuya continuity, in which the Chinese discovered America before Columbus, into the future. Several writers (such as Jon Courtney Grimwood and Kim Stanley Robinson) have written alternate futures, and many writers have written alternate histories, but few if any have quite so stretched their fictional universe.
Jason Sanford
Jason Sanford dominates this issue, with three stories and an interview. The first of the stories, 'Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Peep' is absolutely outstanding. People have turned against policemen and criminals alike as symbols of a violent society, herding them into groups for mass executions under the influence of trillers, people capable of brainwashing those around them via a high pitched cry of 'Peace!' Unsurprisingly the trillers turn out to be something other than human. Outstanding.
Sanford's second story, 'Memoria,' is so dense with concepts that just to outline the ideas is a challenge. All across the multiverse, alternate earths are being destroyed; in an attempt to work out why, ships cross between worlds, surviving the attentions of the barrier god whose ghosts occupy the minds of the crew; to protect them, volunteer 'shields' instead offer themselves up to the ghosts to be occupied, in the process allowing them to burn memories away, giving the shields a kind of peace. Until on one such crossing, something takes over one of the crew, something truly evil...
Sanford's stories are always complex, but this one is a little too complex for its own good. It really needed to either be simplified, or to have been expanded to allow the concepts to breathe.
In the final story 'Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime,' Sanford shows his readers a world where money has been replaced as a medium of exchange by time, so that those who are poor can be indentured to those who are rich and work off the indenture over a period of time. Sanford notes that there are still money-based societies in this future world, but not how the new medium arose, or indeed how the two sit together. Nonetheless, it almost works and is still a good way to round off another superior set of stories.
Rounding the Sanford tribute off is an interview with Andy Hedgecock in which he talks about growing up in the Deep South in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Era, literary Black Swans and the failure of current literature to address real, everyday concerns.
Bookzone
This issue the book reviews include Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, Kurt Vonnegut's Look at the Birdie, Peter F. Hamilton's The Evolutionary Void, and Peter S. Beagle's anthology The Secret History of Fantasy.
In Mutant Popcorn, Nick Lowe reviews the latest films including the latest reconstruction of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's classic Metropolis, Despicable Me and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. While in Laser Fodder, Tony Lee casts his eye over the first season of V, the second of Dollhouse, and the fourth of Heroes. His delight is reserved however, for the remastered fifth series of The Avengers from 1967.
Everything considered, Interzone 231 is a good way to round off another fine year for TTA Press.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
