Interzone #253 Jul: Aug 2014

INTERZONE

ISSUE 253

JUL - AUG 2014

ISSN 0264-3596 (PRINT ISSUE)

Publisher

TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK

w: ttapress.com

e: [email protected]

f: facebook.com/TTAPress

t: @TTApress

Editor

Andy Cox

e: [email protected]

Assistant Fiction Editor

Andy Hedgecock

Book Reviews Editor

Jim Steel

e: [email protected]

Story Proofreader

Peter Tennant

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Events

Roy Gray

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© 2014 Interzone and its contributors

Submissions

Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always welcome via our online system, but please follow the guidelines on our website.

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Interzone 253 Jul - Aug 2014 

TTA Press

Copyright TTA Press and contributors 2014

Published by TTA Press at Smashwords. ISBN 9781311914750

CONTENTS

BUS STOP by WAYNE HAAG

www.ankaris.com/blog

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

interviewed by Matthew S. Dent

INTERFACE

EDITORIAL

NICK LOWE

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

news, obituaries

FICTION

MY FATHER AND THE MARTIAN MOON MAIDS

JAMES VAN PELT

illustrated by Richard Wagner

[email protected] (email)

FLYTRAP

ANDREW HOOK

illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey

bristow-bailey.deviantart.com

THE GOLDEN NOSE

NEIL WILLIAMSON

illustrated by Martin Hanford

martinhanford1974.deviantart.com

BESIDE THE DAMMED RIVER

D.J. COCKBURN

James White Award Winner

CHASMATA

E. CATHERINE TOBLER

THE BARS OF ORION

CAREN GUSSOFF

illustrated by Richard Wagner

REVIEWS

BOOK ZONE

books by Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams, Steve Rasnic Tem, Kieran Shea, A.M. Dellamonica, David Conyers & David Kernot & Jeff Harris, Octavia Butler, Tad Williams, Ra Page, James Morrow, Michael J. Sullivan, Erika Johansen, plus Jonathan McCalmont’s Future Interrupted

LASER FODDER by TONY LEE

blu-ray/DVDs, including If…, Gagarin: First in Space, Her, Under the Skin, The Night is Young, Boy Meets Girl, Frau Im Mond, Mirage Men, Escape From Planet Earth, Hunting the Legend

MUTANT POPCORN by NICK LOWE

films, including Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Tarzan, Godzilla, Maleficent, Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return, Patema Inverted, Upside Down, Transcendence, The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

BACK COVER

EDITORIAL

NICK LOWE

We don’t normally think of theatre as a medium in which sf thrives, outside a small canon of tourist-bait musicals that treat the genre as either a convenience or a joke. A few greybeards remember the brief utopian moment of the late seventies and early eighties when UK outfits like Impact Theatre Cooperative and Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool were putting sf in the vanguard of alternative performance, while in the US Chicago’s Organic Theatre had built up a bulging portfolio of original and adapted work under founder director Stuart Gordon – years before Charles Band’s Empire Pictures propelled him to greater fame as a filmmaker with his debut Re-Animator. But if a lot of us would struggle to nominate anything of comparable moment since those, it’s not as if sf theatre went away.

The other week a couple of wonderful postgrads, Chris Callow from Lincoln and Adam Roberts’ student Susan Gray from Royal Holloway, put together an event called Staging the Future: the first international conference on sf theatre, with NYRSF legend Jen Gunnels keynoting, and reports from around the world on adventures in the theatre of the imaginable past and present. We had Shakespeare and Coward, Ayckbourn and Miéville, early-modern lunar larks and adaptations from Frankenstein to Princess Mononoke, and an amazing gallery of variations on post-apocalyptic and posthuman performance. I got to exhume memories of Ken Campbell’s 22-hour epic chronicle of the UK counterculture The Warp in the derelict Regent cinema in Edinburgh in 1980 with a young Bill Nighy (and then-struggling playwright Terry Johnson taking Jim Broadbent’s parts because Ken knew he could plumb toilets). We were introduced to the work of Bella Poynton, a young campus playwright who’s been pushing the limits of theatre space, time, and action to Stapledonian extremes, staging an interstellar war or a ten-million-year human-machine romance with beguiling warmth, wit, and sense of embodied wonder.

There’s an old misperception that theatre is a medium in competition with film, and doomed to try to mimic its art of illusion. But theatre is above all a space of suggestion and implication, where embodied physicality can conjure worlds with a gesture or line. In that respect, it’s far closer to what sf does with the written word, only kissed with the spell of live mimesis and response. The moment that wrote the grammar for western theatre was the young Aeschylus’ staging of the Iliad with two actors, no set, and a single location. It’s a moment that theatre re-enacts nightly: as Salford’s Bob Moyler, who put on his gloriously unnerving Capek homage Public Service Robots, remarked in our session on end-of-the-world theatre, You could show the apocalypse on stage with a biscuit. Nor are the medium’s moments of glory the tears in rain that might be feared. Impact’s Russell Hoban collaboration The Carrier Frequency has been the object of a meticulous tribute reconstruction off a video of the original staging. Daisy Campbell, daughter of Ken, is following up her celebrated revivals of The Warp with a long-hoped-for resurrection of the SF Theatre’s breakout production Illuminatus! Even Stuart Gordon has found his way back to theatre, not only with 2011’s Re-Animator: The Musical, but latterly branching out into the kind of work that made Organic Theatre risky and notorious in the first place; his latest is the stage horror Taste, a dramatisation of the Arwin Meiwes consensual-cannibalism case. And the fans, as fans will, are networking. Jen Gunnels has a Facebook group, more conferences are mooted, and a dozen of the participants in Susan and Chris’s event were working on sf plays. The oldest spectacle is suddenly, thrillingly, the newest.

ANSIBLE LINK

DAVID LANGFORD

‘All You Zombies’ Dept. ‘Which Bafta and Emmy-winning actress is the great-grandfather of the former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith?’ (Independent quiz)

Awards. Gemmell (heroic fantasy). Novel: Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns. Debut: Brian McClellan, Promise of Blood. Cover: Jason Chan for Emperor of Thorns above. • John W. Campbell Memorial: Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies. • Nebula: Novel: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. • Prometheus (libertarian) special life achievement: Vernor Vinge. • SF Hall of Fame: Leigh Brackett, Frank Frazetta, Stanley Kubrick, Hayao Miyazaki and Olaf Stapledon. • Bram Stoker (horror). Novel: Stephen King, Doctor Sleep. • Sturgeon (short): Sarah Pinsker, ‘In Joy, Knowing the Abyss’ (Strange Horizons).

The Weakest Link. Host: ‘Which G.O. wrote Animal Farm?’ Contestant: ‘I’ve got George Osborne in my head.’ (BBC Pointless) • Host: ‘Which British author wrote The Jungle Book?’ Contestant: ‘E.L. James.’ (ITV Ejector Seat) • Host: ‘In what novel by H.G. Wells does an inventor travel into the future?’ Contestant: ‘Great Expectations.’ (ITV The Chase)

Publishers & Sinners. Angry Robot discontinued its Strange Chemistry (YA genre) and Exhibit A (crime) imprints in June, ‘due mainly to market saturation’ – that is, others have more successfully saturated the market.

GRRM Is Everywhere. The BBC apologised for accidentally sending test-only news alerts to millions of BBC News app subscribers, including the deeply shocking ‘BREAKING NEWS No nudity in latest episode of Game of Thrones!!!’

Queen’s Birthday Honours. John Barrowman – Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood – was made an MBE; so was composer Laurie Johnson, who scored Dr Strangelove and wrote the Avengers and New Avengers TV theme music. Patrick Woodroffe, not the late genre artist but the lighting designer for the 2012 Olympic ceremonies – whose stage projects include Batman Live – became a CBE. (BBC, 14 June)

Silly Season. Daily Mirror headline: ‘Retired US Marine claims he spent 17 years on MARS protecting five human colonies from Martians’. Perks after 20 years of duty: ‘a retirement ceremony on the moon that he claims was presided over by VIPs including ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.’ Gosh.

Ian McEwan sold his archives to the University of Texas for $2 million, and in an interview revealed the sf delights awaiting researchers: ‘…my novel Atonement started out as a science fiction story set two or three centuries into [the] future.’ (Guardian)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Balrog is remembered in the naming of a 16-foot, 900-pound crocodilian from 60 million years ago: Anthracosuchus balrogus. (International Business Times, 3 June) But was it a giant flaming reptile? Did it wield a multi-thonged whip?

Court Circular. The 50 pre-1923 Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain, ruled the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals on 16 June – rejecting the ever-rapacious Conan Doyle estate’s argument that copyright protection for the ten remaining 1923–1927 tales should extend backwards over the entire Holmes canon.

Eoin Colfer, author of the ‘Artemis Fowl’ fantasies, is now the third Irish laureate for children’s fiction: Laureate na nÓg.

Thog’s Masterclass. Radiophonic Workshop Dept. ‘He walked in and heard a sound like a tomb.’ (Lee Child, Tripwire, 1999) • This Day All Thogs Die. ‘Indignation and confusion appeared to flush through Chief Mandich in waves, staining his skin with splotches like the marks of an infection.’ ‘Anodyne Systems, the sole licensed manufacturer of SOD-CMOS.’ ‘He fluttered his hands in front of his face to ward off emotions for which he had no use.’ ‘He shook his head. Carried by its own momentum, his head continued rocking from side to side on his weak neck.’ ‘Her voice ached like Morn’s arm.’ ‘Food and coffee had rubbed the smudge from his gaze.’ ‘Min’s jaws clenched and loosened as if she were chewing iron.’ ‘Smoke seeped out of her hair as if the mind under it had been burned to the ground.’ `Lane hid a grin behind a fringe of unclean hair.’ `His voice sounded as bleak as hard vacuum.’ ‘Standing rigid, as if he were remembering a crucifixion, he shouted.’ ‘The sound of knives filled Hyland’s voice.’ ‘Blaine wore her sexuality like an accusation.’ ‘In response he brandished his beard at her like a club.’ (all Stephen R. Donaldson, The Gap into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die, 1995)

R.I.P.

Ken Brown (1957–2014), UK fan, convention-goer and regular book reviewer for Interzone in the David Pringle era, died from pancreatic cancer on 19 May; he was 57.

John Cocchi (1939–2014), US film historian whose Second Feature: The Best of the ‘B’ Films (2000) covers much sf and horror, was found to have died circa 16 June after being missing since April; he was 74.

Philip Curtis (1920–2012; late notice), UK teacher and author of much sf including the 12-book ‘Mr Browser’ series for younger readers, opening with Mr Browser and the Brain Sharpeners (1979), died on 10 October 2012 aged 92.

Felix Dennis (1947–2014), UK publishing baron who long ago featured in the Oz trial and whose Dennis Publishing magazines include Bizarre, Fortean Times and Viz, died on 22 June; he was 67.

Oscar Dystel (1912–2014), US publisher who turned around the ailing Bantam Books in the early 1950s and remained chairman until 1980, died on 28 May; he was 101. His bestselling acquisitions included The Exorcist and Jaws.

Nancy Garden (1938–2014), US author of fantasy, horror and LGBT fiction for younger readers, died on 24 June aged 76. She won the 2003 Margaret Edwards Award for life achievement in YA literature.

H.R. Giger (1940–2014), influential Swiss artist and designer noted for his surrealist/decadent ‘biomechanoid’ paintings and (most famously) his creation of the alien technology and grotesque monster for Alien (1979), died on 12 May; he was 74. Giger received a Spectrum Grandmaster Award in 2005 and entered the SF Hall of Fame in 2013.

Mihail Gramescu (1951–2014), award-winning Romanian author of several sf novels and collections who was part of his country’s 1980s ‘New Wave’, died on 13 May aged 63.

Sam Greenlee (1930–2014), US author of The Spook who Sat by the Door (1969) – a near-future novel of black uprisings, filmed in 1973 – died on 19 May aged 83.

Dan Jacobson (1929–2014), South African-born novelist whose works include the dystopian The Confessions of Joseph Baisz (1977), the post-holocaust Her Story (1987) and the alternate-history The God-Fearer (1992), died on 12 June; he was 85.

Daniel Keyes (1927–2014), author of the powerful, unforgettable sf tragedy Flowers for Algernon (April 1959 F&SF; novel 1966), died on 15 June aged 86. The short Flowers won a Hugo and the novel a Nebula, both richly deserved. Numerous media adaptations include the film Charly (1968). SFWA honoured Keyes with its Author Emeritus life achievement award in 2006. His last published book was The Asylum Prophecies (2009).