Interzone #266 - September-October 2016
Page 1
ISSUE #266
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016
Publisher
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
w: ttapress.com
e: interzone@ttapress.com
f: TTAPress
t: @TTApress
Editor
Andy Cox
andy@ttapress.com
Book Reviews Editor
Jim Steel
Story Proofreader
Peter Tennant
Events
Roy Gray
roy@ttapress.com
© 2016 Interzone & contributors
Submissions
Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system, but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.
CONTENTS
COVER ART: HEAVEN SPOTS by VINCENT SAMMY
karbonk.deviantart.com
INTERFACE
EDITORIAL: LOVE AND SPREADSHEETS
STEPHEN THEAKER
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
ANSIBLE LINK
DAVID LANGFORD
FICTION
THE APOLOGISTS
TADE THOMPSON
novelette illustrated by Martin Hanford
martinhanford1974.deviantart.com
EXTRATERRESTRIAL FOLK METAL FUSION
GEORGINA BRUCE
story illustrated by Vince Haig
www.barquing.com
SIDEWAYS
RAY CLULEY
novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner
rdwagner@centurylink.net (email)
THREE LOVE LETTERS FROM AN UNREPEATABLE GARDEN
ALIYA WHITELEY
story
THE END OF HOPE STREET
MALCOLM DEVLIN
novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner
REVIEWS
BOOK ZONE
books
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
DVDs & Blu-rays
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
films
EDITORIAL: LOVE AND SPREADSHEETS
STEPHEN THEAKER
Interzone is nominated for best magazine in this year’s British Fantasy Awards, as it has been every year save one since the category was introduced. TTA Press stablemate Black Static goes one better: it has been a nominee every single year. That remarkable run reflects the esteem in which these magazines are held by British fans of fantasy, science fiction and horror. I’ve organised those awards for the last four years, and the chance to help fans thus express their appreciation was a big part of why I got involved.
There are fourteen British Fantasy Awards, which means we’re putting a lot of love out into the world, but it also means a lot of work, and it’s work done under constant scrutiny, with the internet ready to stamp on your toes for the slightest misstep. So while I envy my successor the pleasure they’ll have running the awards in 2017, I’ll worry a bit for them too, because these things have a tendency to go quite publicly awry, as they have with the Hugo nominations process lately.
When an awards system produces such peculiar, obscure or even ridiculous results, you’ll hear people say the system is broken, but when voters are determined to vote in peculiar, obscure or even ridiculous ways, an awards system is generally going to reflect that in the results. Put a brick in a microwave and the results won’t be edible – that doesn’t mean the microwave is broken. Or at least it wasn’t till you tried to cook a brick.
What’s admirable about the response to the Hugo award’s well-publicised puppy problems has been the insistence on sticking to the established procedures for changing the rules, even though that meant at least another year or two of slightly embarrassing nominees. That sort of rigour can only be good for the long-term health of an award. Changes brought in quickly and thoughtlessly in response to this year’s problems just lead to brand new problems next year.
And whether it’s the BFAs, the Hugos, the Brits or the Oscars, the odd results are often the ones I find most interesting and revealing. The BFA winners of the last few years have been unusually well received, but still, having supervised fifty or so juries, I’ve been fascinated by how often a group of intelligent, diligent readers can surprise me by not rating a nominee I adored, or loving a nominee I didn’t, and have perfectly good reasons either way.
Literary awards are inherently rather silly. There’s no ideal form for them. Each potential system is blinkered in its own way, each has its quirks, strengths and shortcomings. But they can be a great conduit for our affection, a boost to creators, a flashpoint for discussion, an arena for fighting over the issues of the day, and a record of the changing tides. Let’s try to enjoy them, for all their faults. Even in disaster, the Hugos gave us Chuck Tingle. Love is real.
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
The Animal-Narcotic Complex
Few films have influenced my thinking as much as Werner Herzog’s 2011 documentary Into the Abyss. The film begins with the story of two young men who broke into a gated community at gunpoint and murdered a 51-year-old woman in order to take her car for a joyride. Rather than obsessing over the facts of the case, Herzog explores both the emotional consequences of the crime and the psychological conditions that inspired it. What he finds is that the survivors of the crime wind up living in a world very similar to that of the murderers, a world where trauma passes from parent to child and stranger to stranger in a never-ending torrent of cruelty and sadness. In Herzog’s view, to be human is not just to suffer but to pass the consequences of that suffering on to those we claim to love. Sure…we try to re-invent ourselves and to draw a line under the past but no shop-bought persona or social media gang colours can separate us from the histories that shaped our thoughts and emotional reactions.
A similar vision of the human experience bubbles up through the pages of Emma Geen’s lusciously angular debut novel The Many Selves of Katherine North. Set a few years into the future of Bristol, the book tells of a young woman who works for a corporation that projects human consciousness into animal bodies for research purposes. The novel tells Katherine’s story out of chronological order, meaning that every chapter reads like a moment stolen from the life of a completely different person. Grounding this evocatively asynchronous narrative is a series of sensational set-pieces in which Katherine finds herself ‘being’ a variety of different animals including foxes, octopi, bats, and spiders. Each of these vignettes has been extensively researched and is rendered with considerable style and clarity given the technical challenges inherent in getting readers to imagine what it feels like to be an entirely different kind of animal. The novel glides effortlessly between the character’s different selves and invites us to piece the different vignettes together into something resembling the linear cause and effect of conventional character development. A clear picture does start to emerge once the novel reaches its climax and Geen begins weaving together the various threads of Katherine’s life but the uncertainty and dislocation that hovers over much of the novel is never anything less than magnificent.
One of the most interesting things about the projection process is that even the co-called ‘phenomenauts’ themselves seem unsure as to where they end and their borrowed selves begin. For example, the characters speak at length about “Sperlman’s Shock” and the existential horror of squeezing a human mind into an inhuman body but they are reluctant to acknowledge (let alone discuss) the hardships involved in abandoning the addictive complexities of their animal selves and returning to the crushing domesticity that
attaches itself to their human bodies. At first, Geen downplays the unpleasantness of homecoming but Katherine’s lapses into animalistic behaviour and fondness for abstracted animal analogies point us towards a deeper yearning.
The novel takes place at a time when the ambitions of Katherine’s employers are beginning to expand beyond the admittedly limited horizons of academic zoology. With plans to create a market for animal ‘tourism’ already in place, the chief executive of the corporation approaches Katherine to serve as corporate poster-girl for the new initiative. Despite Katherine’s extensive experience and love for her work, the promotion turns out to be nothing short of disastrous as Katherine’s blossoming paranoia encounters the corporation’s lack of principle and unleashes a rapidly-escalating cycle of exploitation and disruption that reveals the true costs of psychological projection. However, while this thriller-type plot is never anything less than engaging, the real meat of the novel lays not so much in the story it tells but in the character it develops in Katherine.
As Geen shuffles us back and forth inside the life of Katherine North, we discover an array of different selves. Aside from the animal selves she borrows as part of her job, there is also a raving derelict, a sexually immature teenager, and a daughter whose father leaves her on her own to cope with a terminally-ill mother. Piecing these selves together we detect echoes of Herzog’s Into the Abyss in the way that Katherine is contorted by trauma and deformed by the sadness of others. We watch as an optimistic and animal-obsessed little girl is broken by the world to the point where she desperately wants to be someone or something other than herself. The corporation wants to sell its animal tourism as the ultimate escapist experience but nobody stops to consider why people might be so desperate to escape their own lives.
Another interesting thing about the book’s projection process is the way that it comes to symbolise the capitalist exploitation of our need to exist in a world that makes some form of sense. The challenge faced by Katherine in each of her animal projections is not only to make the animals’ bodies function as evolution decreed but also to find a way for her human thought processes to co-exist with the sometimes overwhelming instincts that accompany her animal selves. While these instincts make it difficult for humans to fully integrate human bodies, full integration provides a sense of self far clearer than anything a human might ever hope to experience. Spiders spin webs in order to catch food and spin more webs just as tigers hunt in order to remain strong and defend the territory that will allow them to hunt tomorrow. Animal selves provide no room for the doubt and self-loathing that characterises so many human lives and this simplicity provides the ultimate in existential intoxication.
Capitalism is an economic system that has proved itself incompatible not just with human flourishing but also the long-term survival of the human race. In order to exist under capitalism, people must learn to subordinate their needs and wishes to those of the social classes and institutions that make up the capitalist system. While capitalism serves to alienate people from each other, from the work they do, and from the things they produce, it also alienates us from the activities that promote not just our survival but also our psychological wellbeing. Marx referred to these activities as human species-essence and the reason that Katherine keeps returning to her animal selves is that while her human life is disconnected from all possible sources of happiness, her animal selves are firmly rooted in the unending quest for life and happiness. She yearns for that sense of rootedness in the world because capitalism has made it impossible for humans to survive and flourish. By offering to provide humans with access to the essence of other species, Katherine’s employers are effectively selling painkillers for wounds they themselves are helping to inflict on people like Katherine.
Though perhaps a little over-tidy in the conclusion, Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North is one of the most exciting debut novels I have read in years. Full of scientific and philosophical speculation and yet grounded in a world of material conditions and psychological consequences, the novel provides exactly what I want to see from 21st Century science fiction and does so from outside of the creative vacuum that used to be the genre publishing business.
Earlier this year, Interzone’s own Nina Allan wrote an excellent piece about the current state of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and raised a number of vital questions about not only the award’s relationship with genre culture but also about the books that jurors have tended to select in recent years. Like Nina, I became aware of the award in the early 2000s and so think of it as the place where genre culture reaches beyond its own professional hierarchies and connects with the speculative writing being published outside of genre. As Nina explains, the Clarke has never really lived up to that reputation and were that potential ever to be realised I believe it would be through the selection of books like The Many Selves of Katherine North. Despite what genre culture tells us, the future of science fiction lies not in familiar names deconstructing outdated tropes with one eye on the young adult market but in young writers looking at the world and confronting whichever horrors lie in wait around the next corner.
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
Wired in the Weird
In July I was in Cambridge for the fifty-second annual folk festival. Crowds make me uncomfortable normally, but being a part of the gathering in the grounds of Cherry Hinton Hall was an experience of another order. I came away inspired, not just by what I’d seen and heard but by the sense of inclusivity and tolerance the festival seemed to encapsulate. Never have fourteen thousand people seemed so like members of a single family. The weather was great, too – not a green wellie in sight…
Turning to the music itself, I couldn’t help noticing how strong the women artists seemed, singing and making music together. Bands such as Songs of Separation, Sound of the Sirens (a duo who, I later learned, first came together when they were working at the Exeter nightclub Timepiece, the venue for many a personal memory and scurrilous anecdote) and Stick in the Wheel demonstrate a no-holds-barred, no-compromise attitude, a pride in the power of the female voice – both words and music – that has been too often overlooked, shoved aside or controlled by men. If we consider the struggles endured by artists such as Beverley Martyn, Vashti Bunyan, Anne Briggs and Sandy Denny simply to gain equal billing with their male folk counterparts, we will feel all the more uplifted by the growing confidence of today’s women musicians in claiming their autonomy and their audience.
It was no less inspirational and reassuring to find that folk music has lost none of its radicalism. Many of the artists I saw perform did not hesitate in getting their Billy Bragg on, making open reference on stage to the shocking surrealism of the European referendum result, the current power struggles within the Labour party, the lunatic ignorance of Donald Trump, the increasing momentum of environmental activism and the destructive influence of the globalised financial sector upon ordinary jobs and working people. They weren’t just paying fashionable lip-service either. The desire to communicate cause and effect, to speak up and speak out – this impulse is what drives folk music and what has always driven it. For anyone who still has the idea that folk is just a bunch of Morris men in embroidered smocks, I’d suggest they go and listen to what Le Vent du Nord has to say about Quebecois independence.
Set against our common interest in weird fiction and speculative storytelling, it is important for us to remember that much of the power of folk music resides not only in its close and continuing association with the landscapes and political realities in which people live and work, but equally with the occult, underground nature of pagan spirituality. Folk music has always been determined on bypassing the authority-based structures of the organised church, drawing its energy from something deeper and more basic, more tied to the beliefs and rituals entwined within the very vegetation of the land we live on. Folk is weird, in other words. I think that as readers, writers and listeners this is something we recognise intuitively, whether we are steeped
in folk history or not. Even a song as simple and as universally known as ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ contains within its schoolyard lyric a sinister rhythm, an atmosphere of darkness and of warning, a circle of dancing ghosts.
When we look back towards the renaissance in British classical music that began to gather pace in the years immediately before the First World War and that continues to this day, it is interesting to note just how many of its early proponents drew their inspiration from the twinned wells of traditional folk melody and its occult dimension. Arnold Bax, probably best known for his tone poem ‘Tintagel’, was obsessed with both Arthurian legend and with the land of faerie, a parallel dimension in which the fair folk held sway over the occult, Anglian kingdom that has always been theirs. We see these ideas brought to captivating musical fruition in another of Bax’s tone poems, ‘In the Faery Hills’. The critic and composer Philip Heseltine was for some time a practising magician of the Aleister Crowley persuasion, a member of the infamous occult society the Golden Dawn and whose strongly folk-influenced music was written under the telling pseudonym Peter Warlock. The composer John Ireland, who also had connections with the Golden Dawn, was powerfully affected by the supernatural tales of Arthur Machen, with whom he corresponded. Ireland claimed to have been haunted by a vision of Machen’s ‘White People’, a defining experience he later set to music in his Legend for piano and orchestra.