Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Read online

  7 ‘Trans-Siberia: An Account of a Journey’ Sarah Brooks issue #249

  8 ‘The Kindest Man in Stormland’ John Shirley issue #249

  9 ‘Dark Gardens’ Greg Kurzawa issue #248

  10 ‘Ad Astra’ Carole Johnstone issue #248

  Comments

  Stephen Tollyfield

  I like the stories you like – but you do have Black Static, so I cannot escape the perception that you are straining at the boundaries of what constitutes a story for Interzone. However being someone for whom the canonical history of SF is Golden Age, through Ballard and cyberpunk to wherever it is we are now, which has been so admirably challenged by Jonathan McCalmont in his ‘Future Interrupted’ columns, I have to admit that I might be wrong… In fact #249 is such a good issue that it almost gives the lie to the point made above.

  Jens Berke

  It’s a tough choice to pick the best story because there were at least half a dozen stories that were excellent. Best story: ‘Sentry Duty’ by Nigel Brown. While reading it I just thought it was very good. It slowly became a favourite afterwards, when the story popped up in my mind every now and then. Apart from being well written I think what makes it most excellent is how it deals with the universal topic of a culture clash and how rituals and traditions force actions and behaviour upon beings – in this case Ssthra, who can’t help but obey to her upbringing as soon as she realises that Jo is prey, no matter how good the two were getting along before and no matter how much she would probably have loved to enjoy more of Jo’s company.

  Barbara Hvidt

  Thus ends my first year as a subscriber to Interzone. I am very pleased with the magazine as a whole. Special praise for ‘Future Interrupted’, my favourite content apart from the fiction.

  David K. Smith

  I think the quality of production since the change to the new format has been fantastic and I would like to thank you for keeping science fiction alive for me. Interzone provides a variety of science fiction that meets my idea of how a good magazine should both challenge and satisfy the needs of its audience. Within the list of stories I have liked there are some which tell familiar stories and some that are told in familiar ways, but there are also those that try to do something new or pick up on a modern phenomenon. It is the range of style and ideas which keep the magazine fresh in my mind and it is the design and illustrations that hold these stories within a consistent format that encourages me to explore each issue.

  Christopher M. Geeson

  My particular favourites this year were Guy Haley’s ‘iRobot’, John Shirley’s ‘The Kindest Man in Stormland’ and ‘The Face Tree’ by Antony Mann (I’ve been eagerly reading every Antony Mann story you’ve published ever since ‘Air Cube’ way back in #194). It’s stories like these three that keep me subscribing.

  Ray Cluley

  Interzone provided a cracking load of favourites in 2013, many of which I believe would be right at home in some of the year’s ‘best of’ anthologies. ‘iRobot’ by Guy Haley: Loved this. Loved it. I’ve read it several times now and use it in my creative writing class as an example of what can be done with only a couple of thousand words. This piece suggests more story than it tells, and the lack of detail, together with the brevity, makes for an emotive story that reminds us that we’re a mere speck on the planet, destined to destroy ourselves. With some effective moments of humour, this is a poignant melancholy story without descending into overt cautionary tale, and all the more powerful for it. Probably my favourite of the year.

  Soon Lee

  It has been another very good year for Interzone. I enjoy the variety of stories published of generally very readable quality, and regularly excellent. If I had to choose just one best story it would be ‘The Hareton K-12 County School and Adult Extension’ by James Van Pelt. It would not be at all surprising to see it feature in forthcoming best of the year anthologies. The other stories I’m upvoting (no downvotes from me) are the ones that were memorable in some way and are the sorts of stories I would like to see more in future issues of Interzone.

  Darrell Sefton

  I have been subscribing to Interzone since #217 and have noticed a trend over recent years for more ‘fantasy’ and less ‘sci-fi’, though I acknowledge the line dividing the two is a thin blurred one at best. In some (albeit rare) cases stories have seemed better suited to TTA’s sister publication Black Static. Although I far prefer ‘classic’ techie sci-fi (I’m an engineer after all), I find the overwhelming majority of what’s found in Interzone to be engaging and very well written, even if I don’t necessarily enjoy every single story. Fortunately (as far as I’m concerned) there seems to have been a resurgence of ‘classic’ sci-fi in recent issues. Anything by Jason Sanford is always good and I really enjoyed the ongoing stories in Lavie Tidhar’s millieu. Oh and despite some initial misgivings, I like the new smaller format. And obviously the cover art, which is always of exceptional quality. And the book/DVD/film reviews! I’d write more but I have to get on and I’m sure you’ve already slipped into a coma after my blathering. All in all, keep up the good work!

  Nick Camm

  My vote for this year’s best story has to be Philip Suggars’ ‘Automatic Diamante’. Brave, fresh, dark and funny and just the right side of experimental. A story that managed to evoke sympathy for a psychopathic killing machine. Simply splendid.

  J.B. Zeelie

  It was another great year for Interzone. The general standard has remained steadily high, which is a testament to the editorial staff of the magazine… I look forward to 2014’s stories, as well as those for years to come.

  David Thomas

  Once again the excellent stories of Lavie Tidhar have been a real highlight, with the enjoyable ‘The Book Seller’ a particularly strong contender. However, my choice is ‘Dark Gardens’ by Greg Kurzawa. It’s haunting, strange and full of images which linger. Wonderful.

  THE POSSET POT

  NEIL WILLIAMSON

  ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER

  The day I found the posset pot was the last time I got myself into serious bubble trouble. Scared me shitless at the time, letting my guard slip like that and I admit it put me on the downer that, ultimately, sealed poor Ettrick’s fate. I’m not writing this as a confession, but he deserves a record. I miss the old bastard more than I would have thought possible. Every day I wish he’d not been so stupid, but even I can’t shoulder the responsibility for what happened to him. Some things just happen.

  Ettrick always maintained that it was me who had a death wish. Said it was understandable, given my circumstances. But Ettrick didn’t live in the real world. He didn’t understand that, since the bubbles, survival had become a matter of pushing your luck. If you wanted to eat, if you wanted heat – let’s not even mention the occasional luxuries he was quite happy for me to bring home from my expeditions – you had to be out there, where the bubbles were.

  I was picking my way down the embankment from the University tower towards the River Kelvin. My thoughts had strayed into memory, thinking about how it used to look. That smooth slope of greensward, the trees, the southern aspect of the city stretching out beyond; not the weird moonscape it’s become, precisely cratered as if God had been at it with his ice-cream scoop. Like a scene out of some…no, see that’s the thing: Hollywood never imagined an apocalypse as bizarre as this.

  Dwelling on the past like that, even for a handful of seconds, was deadly, and I missed the tell-tale wink of microturbulence, the rainbow shimmer that presaged the incursion. The bubble was suddenly just there, hanging above the ground a yard to my left and growing fast. I scrambled up the slope, watched it carefully from a safer distance. As always, it was exactly as thin and beautiful as the ones we blew from detergent solution when we were kids. It expanded quickly, but stopped at beach ball size. I spun around, looking for multiples, but there were none. Only then did I let out my breath. While I was fucking lucky that it had stopped at the size that it had, I wondered what I’d have done if
it had grown larger. Large enough. I wondered if I’d have risked it.

  “Jesus Christ, Aird. You’ve got to pay attention.” Enunciating my self-admonishment righted my priorities, reoriented me towards survival and away from recrimination, but I kept it to a mutter. Even if you are one of the last people left, it’s still not right to talk to yourself in public.

  I watched the bubble run its course. Despite the havoc they’ve wrought, they remain fascinating. They’re so perfectly, delicately constructed. Like actual soap bubbles in so many ways, except they don’t drift in the air currents. They hardly even distort the light. This one hovered a foot above the weeds, rotating slowly. As always, I jotted down the details – location, size, height, spin – before the tell-tale darkening of the sphere’s surface began. I call it steeling for the way a bubble’s appearance changes to resemble a huge ball bearing in the last few moments before its integrity collapses. I backed away a little further. You never know what can come through in an exchange.

  When the bubble popped, a rush of air ruffled my hair and set some newly decapitated dandelion stalks nodding like proverbial headless chickens. A rush of air, but nothing else. Sky again, I wrote, then breathed deeply, catching the exotic lemongrass and pepper aroma of the air of Elsewhere. I felt the prickle of tears.

  The sky was deepening behind the remains of the University. The building’s lovely, overworked symmetry has been sliced through so often now, sphere after sphere intersecting with the remains of the masonry, that those once ornate neo-gothic spires have been turned into a forest of precarious, delicate peaks; imagine African termite mounds modelled by rudimentary algorithm, but too slender, too sharp. Sometimes, unable to support themselves, bits fall off. I don’t think I’ll ever accept Glasgow’s new topography. It changed so fast. It’s barely recognisable as a city any more.

  There was little else of note on the trek home. In Kelvingrove, the last tree had toppled. The crown lay on the ground like a head of broccoli, but the entire trunk was missing and, with it, a sizeable bowl of roadway. The bubble that took it must have been huge. Before our world began to be swapped piece by piece for another universe, trees wouldn’t have been high on my list of things I’d miss. But the place looks so empty without them.

  And I saw a foam in Yorkhill. It appeared along the side of a bisected Vauxhall Vectra, spilling along the car’s flank like shaken up lemonade. It effervesced, sizzled and left a trail of acne-like scarring across the door and roof.

  The streets around here are always the worst for me. Not because of how much they’ve changed, rather the extent to which they haven’t. Within the length of a street the signs of bubble activity decrease so dramatically that it is only too easy to remember the days when the city was whole.

  I always try to avoid glancing along Yorkhill Street. I always fail. Karen and I viewed a flat there only a week before the first bubbles appeared. The Estate Agent’s board is still there, planted hopefully beside the door of the tenement close. As if the housing market’s suffering a temporary blip and will soon recover. Ironically, it’s in an infinitely more desirable area now. Ettrick calls this the golden circle. Two or three blocks of tenements that have inexplicably retained their full complement of roofs, walls and floors. They’d go for a bomb if there was anyone left here to put an offer in.

  But there isn’t. There was just me and Ettrick. And now there’s just me.

  Ettrick’s flat is at the very centre of the circle. The tenement is in the middle of the block, and the flat is on the middle floor. Insulated. We never worked out how or why. It was this miraculous intactness that drew me here after the evacuation. We’d both had different motives for staying behind. Ettrick was agoraphobic, or so he claimed anyway, and I’d sworn not to leave without Karen. Stupidly, some would say, but I couldn’t help that. Anyway, once we’d discovered each other it made sense to stay together. To try and help each other. It’s what humans are supposed to do, isn’t it?

  Inside the flat, I let the shutting door announce my return while I shrugged off my pack and hung my duffel coat on the antique coat stand. The hall smelled of Mr Sheen.

  “Who is it?” Ettrick was fearful even when he had no earthly reason to be.

  I used to make smart-arsed replies, each of them equally impossible – it’s the postman, the tax inspector, Julian fucking Clary – but the humour wore out fast. “Just me,” I said.

  Ettrick appeared at the kitchen door. “We’re out of polish.” He was wearing marigolds. “I don’t suppose…?”

  I sighed inwardly, but Ettrick’s constant cleaning was the least of his faults. “Get the kettle on,” I said. “And let’s have a look.”

  I put my pack on the table.

  “Where did you get to today?” Ettrick said, as he slid up the window sash and retrieved a jam jar from the row brimming with the previous night’s rain. There was early speculation that the bubbles might affect the weather, but Glasgow’s always been a rain town. If there was one thing we aren’t short of, it’s fresh water. He poured it into a saucepan and lit the camping stove.

  While he did that, I took a marker pen and hatched a series of lines on the city map tacked to the wall. “St George’s Cross,” I said. “Some of Maryhill too.” I fished out my notebook next, and began to mark my bubble observations on the map as well. The foam instance was right on the edge of our protected zone. In contrast to the red scrawls and black crosshatching, the circle of yellowing street map really did look golden.

  “That’s too far away.”

  “Not if we’re going to get through the winter.” I lined up my booty on the table. Two invaluable camping gas cylinders. Assorted cleaning products. A catering sized bag of Tetley tea bags. Two pigeon carcases wrapped in newspaper.

  The pan on the stove began to bubble. “Are those fresh?” Ettrick patted nervously at his wispy hair. He was kind of freaky about disease.

  “Killed them with my own hands.” It hadn’t been much of a feat. The birds had been tottering around a garage forecourt blinded by foam.

  “Good. Been a while since we had some decent protein.”

  I smiled at that. He was always like a pernickety househusband criticising the weekly shopping. Next came my own personal triumph. The Asda bag rattled as I extracted it.

  Ettrick fell on the package then curled his lip. “Cruet?”

  Cruet. Philistine.

  “Trust me, you’d not be looking forward to this pigeon half as much without a bit of salt and pepper. And look.” I held up a fistful of jars. “Tarragon, basil, coriander. Chilli flakes, man! And they said civilisation was dead.” I had no intention of telling Ettrick that I’d almost broken a leg liberating these little inconsequentials. Getting up towards Maryhill Road, underground bubble activity had caused subsidence. A winding close staircase had given way and I’d narrowly saved myself from a fall. The homes themselves were not as intact as they had appeared from the street either. It’s hard to tell sometimes. You can view a building from all angles and your hopes rise, only to find that it’s little more than a shell when you get inside. This one wasn’t that bad, but there wasn’t a great deal to salvage either.

  There were bodies, though. At least, parts of bodies. Back at the beginning, when bubbles were popping up everywhere and the city, the country, the world were rife with panic, fleeing once and fleeing again, there were a lot of bodies. From the catastrophically dismembered to the apparently intact whose injuries had been wholly internal, but no less agonising, to the ones who had escaped the bubbles but nevertheless fallen victim to the dissolution of society that had followed.

  I never got used to the bodies. It might have helped to talk about them but Ettrick forbade any mention of the subject. Even by that time, when most of the carnage had been scooped off to Elsewhere along with everything else, I still stumbled across them on a regular basis. Here I found a man’s decayed head and abdomen, face down in a crawling position, a child’s arm in one green tee-shirt sleeve nearby, both severed and sealed
by the spherical section that passed through the laminate flooring, the ash deadening, the joists and the downstairs ceiling. I was quick about jumping across and performing a ruthless excavation of the kitchen’s cabinets.

  If we were forbidden from mentioning the bodies, we talked about the bubbles constantly. We agreed on some things, disagreed on others. The reason for it all we laid confidently at the door of CERN, or some similar and perhaps less public enterprise. A next-generation LHC somewhere malfunctioning, causing unpredictable and uncontrollable localised spot irruptions of other universes into our own. That much we borrowed from the theorists on TV before we lost the media, and presumably the theorists as well.

  Beyond that it was all down to speculation. How many universes? One? A million? Overlapping earths, Ettrick said once before dismissing the idea in favour of the one he would stick with: that the bubbles were wormholes briefly connecting our Earth to random points in its own history. Not Elsewheres, but Elsewhens. He produced a dense stream of logic to support his theory that was hard to find a chink in, and grew more robust every time we returned to the subject, but being out there every day, I knew he was wrong. Instead, I favoured his comment about overlapping Earths, and constructed my own body of evidence to support that theory. I imagined two versions of the same planet, similar apart from some fundamental differences, somehow passing each other in space-time. Points of contact happening in different places, at different times. Maybe even different planetary inclinations. Here we mostly got their air, while on the other side of the Earth we’d heard reports of the opposite, rains of rubble. If that was true, though, this period of conjunction was limited. The planets were already passing, and beginning to drift apart again. The frequency of the bubbles was dropping off.