ISSUE #267
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2016
Publisher
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
w: ttapress.com
e: [email protected]
f: TTAPress
t: @TTApress
Books and films for review are always welcome and should be sent to the above address
Editor
Andy Cox
[email protected]
Story Proofreader
Peter Tennant
Events
Roy Gray
[email protected]
© 2016 Interzone & contributors
Submissions
Unsolicited submissions of short stories are always very welcome via our online system – tta.submittable.com/submit – but please be sure to follow the contributors’ guidelines.
CONTENTS
COVER ART: THE ORION CRUSADES: INFECTION by VINCENT SAMMY
karbonk.deviantart.com
TADE THOMPSON
interviewed in the Book Zone by Maureen Kincaid Speller
INTERFACE
EDITORIAL: THE JAMES WHITE AWARD
MARTIN McGRATH
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
ANSIBLE LINK
DAVID LANGFORD
FICTION
ALTS
HARMONY NEAL
story illustrated by Richard Wagner
[email protected] (email)
DOGFIGHTS IN OLYMPUS AND OTHER ABSENCES
RYAN ROW
story illustrated by Jim Burns
www.alisoneldred.com/artistJimBurns.html
THE HUNGER OF AUNTIE TIGER
SARAH BROOKS
story illustrated by Jim Burns
YOU MAKE PATTAYA
RICH LARSON
story illustrated by Dave Senecal
senecal.deviantart.com
ROCK, PAPER, INCISORS
DAVID CLEDEN
James White Award winning story illustrated by Martin Hanford
martinhanford1974.deviantart.com
MY GENERATIONS SHALL PRAISE
SAMANTHA HENDERSON
story illustrated by Richard Wagner
REVIEWS
BOOK ZONE
books, including interviews with Tade Thompson and Chris Beckett
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
films
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
DVDs & Blu-rays
EDITORIAL: THE JAMES WHITE AWARD
MARTIN McGRATH
Often, when faced with a challenge that seems overwhelming, the hardest thing to do is to find a place to start. A traveller, even one who knows the exact location of their destination, is lost if they can’t work out where they are right now. The most detailed map is useless if you can’t find your place on it.
Sometimes we all need a great big arrow and a friendly YOU ARE HERE sign to help us on our way.
That’s how I’d like to think of the James White Award – especially for those writers, like David Cleden, who are lucky enough to win the competition (David’s ‘Rock, Paper, Incisors’ appears in this issue). Winning the Award is not meant to be the end of a journey, the competition is for new writers, we’re the starting post not the finishing line. I hope we’re a friendly hand on the shoulder that guides an author to the foot of the path. There’s no guarantee of success, the route is perilous, but here, at least, is the point from which you can plan a route forward.
The James White Award is fifteen years old this year. When I took over as administrator of the competition in 2010 it was partly because I was an admirer of James White, whose pacifist science fiction – written in Northern Ireland, much of it during the worst of The Troubles – had a big effect on me when I discovered it growing up in the six counties in the 1980s. I wanted to keep the competition going in his honour. But it was also because, at the time, I was trying to write my own short stories and I felt I understood the frustration (not to say heartbreak) that new writers experience as the rejections pile up. I liked the idea that I could make a little contribution towards helping others take a first step towards getting noticed.
My own faltering attempts at “being a writer” haven’t amounted to much, but I look on the seven stories that the James White Award has had published in Interzone in my time as administrator (six winners and one runner-up) and feel a tiny bit of pride. I know from having run the Interzone Readers’ Poll for a time that these stories can affect some readers and I hope the Award brings something a little different to the mix of my favourite science fiction magazine.
The James White Award is as strong as it has ever been. For that I’m grateful to the support of Interzone and also the British Science Fiction Association. With luck we’ll continue to provide new writers with directions to the starting line for years to come.
The James White Award is currently open to submission. If you are a new writer and would like to find out more, visit www.jameswhiteaward.com.
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
More than Fools. More than Fodder.
Recently, this column has devoted itself to first novels in an effort to force me from my comfort zone and into a place where I can help to challenge the field’s tendency to focus its attention on the work of people who are already widely known and beloved. However, while I do intend to return to first novels soon enough, it occurs to me that any attempt to shift the focus of genre culture must involve both a celebration of the unseen and an honest evaluation of the familiar. This desire to confront the successful, the commercial and the overly-familiar led me straight to Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series, the latest instalment of which was published earlier this year.
The Shadow Police novels are best described as being part of the increasingly crowded sub-genre of novels about magical policemen solving crimes in old London town. Aside from Shadow Police, the last six years have also seen the emergence of such series as Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, Mark Morris’ Obsidian Heart, and Sarah Pinborough’s Dog-Faced Gods. While the fact that all of these novels have been published since 2010 suggests that the market may be reaching saturation point, it is also worth noting that all of these series have emerged in the aftermath of both the financial crisis and the Conservative government’s ill-conceived and failed attempts to return the country to solvency. For both good and ill, Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series are undoubtedly novels of the now.
2013’s London Falling begins by introducing us to an undercover unit trying to build a case against a gang leader whose rise through the London underworld had been nothing short of meteoric. Drawing on such intelligent TV procedurals as The Wire and Prime Suspect, Cornell introduces us to a cast of conflicted characters who are all trying to find happiness in a job that is hampered on all sides by corruption, incompetence, and institutional decay. Once the mundane elements of the setting are safely in place, Cornell pulls back the curtain and reveals that his gang leader owes his success to a deal he struck with a witch who happens to support West Ham football club. When the cast discover the deal and move to arrest the witch, they wind up accidentally gaining the ability to see the true face of magical London.
The first thing to strike you about the Shadow Police novels is how they appear to have been written with television in mind. This is perhaps not surprising given that Cornell has written for series like Doctor Who and Robin Hood but everything from the uncluttered, efficient characterisation through to the reliance on sensational but cheap-to-produce set pieces speaks to a desire to see
these books turned into TV. While this stylistic choice deprives the books of the kind of ambiguity that might encourage you to pick up a book rather than watch TV there is no denying the skill and grace with which Cornell handles his plot and characters. Everything keeps moving, nothing outstays it welcome, and the whole thing builds and builds to a superbly tense conclusion. I’ve often complained in the past that genre audiences are poorly served when it comes to thrillers but all of the Shadow Police novels work like quantum clockwork. In truth, the problems only start to creep in once you move beyond the plot and start thinking about what it is that Cornell is trying to say about the current moment.
Much like Mike Carey’s excellent comic series The Unwritten, Cornell presents magic as a form of literal postmodernism in so far as the world is physically shaped and re-shaped by the beliefs of the people that inhabit it. This means that stories have real power in the world of the Shadow Police and that people with influence tend to have magical power as they can control the way that other people see the world. The backdrop of the novels is that the recent destruction of certain institutions in British public life has allowed traditional ways of seeing the world to be replaced by a worldview that is harsher, colder, and of benefit to considerably fewer people. The political dimensions of this backdrop are made quite explicit in 2015’s The Severed Streets.
The second novel in the series finds London consumed by riots as young people take to the streets in order to protest their government’s austerity programme. With the police threatening to strike for the first time in centuries and far-right nationalists causing trouble in the background, Cornell adopts the viewpoint of the political establishment and depicts all forms of political activism as disruptive, toxic, and ultimately pointless. The pointlessness of political activism is evident partly from the fact that the demonstrations turn out to be the result of magical rabble-rousing rather than genuine political disagreement but also from the way that Cornell skilfully juxtaposes the incoherent rage of the faceless masses with the nuanced emotional lives of magical elites who can not only see what is actually happening on the streets of London but also act meaningfully to solve the problems. In a move that can only be described as pandering to his audience, Cornell not only imbues Neil Gaiman with magical powers and has him deliver huge infodumps; he also contrives to make the magical underworld look an awful lot like organised fandom. Turns out that even on the grim and rain-slicked streets of magical London, Fans are still Slan.
The third novel in the series is dominated by the figure of Sherlock Holmes and so winds up reading a lot like an attempt to land Cornell a job writing for either Sherlock or Elementary. However, despite being the weakest novel in the series so far, Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? winds up doing a pretty good job of demonstrating the flaws in Cornell’s literary methods.
The novel’s primary subplot involves a character who has been traumatised by the time they spent in Hell. At first, the trauma is handled quite sensitively as the character’s growing distress and uncharacteristically desperate attempts to avoid trauma-related cues map quite well onto what we know of post-traumatic stress. The problem is that rather than dealing with the character’s condition in a realistic fashion, Cornell stages a magical intervention and cures them by having them choose to act more like themselves. The reason Cornell’s treatment of PTSD seems both offensive and simple-minded is that PTSD is a genuine mental disorder with an increasingly well-understood pathology. Presenting it as a magical illness that can be cured by sufferers pulling themselves together is not only insulting to people who struggle with the disorder every day of their lives, it also serves to distance and distract us from the psychophysiological processes that make us who we are. In other words, Cornell could have told us something about the workings of the human mind but instead he chose to wave a magic wand and make everything okay.
While the Shadow Police series does touch on real political issues, it uses its genre elements to distance and distract us from what we already know about the world. Rather than using genre techniques to help us engage with complex issues like the effects of privatisation, the misguided politics of austerity, the cynical exploitation of racial tensions by successive governments, and the way that neoliberalism has colonised our thought processes and turned us all into fungible commodities, Cornell draws a veil over the real world of cause and effect and invites us to engage in the fantasy that all of our problems are rooted in the actions of a grinning cocaine demon in a well-tailored suit. This is not so much engaging with the real world as exploiting our emotional ties to the real in order to dress up a load of reactionary fables about wizards, goblins, dark lords and magical weapons.
Even by the logic of the novels, Cornell is on the side of the baddies; he hints at liberation but his message is that people are nothing but blind, faceless, and incoherent rage. People need elites to make decisions as their problems are both magically intractable and beyond the limits of their perceptual capacity. If stories did shape the world then the Shadow Police series would be part of the problem. Contrary to what Paul Cornell would have us believe, we are more than fools and can be more than fodder.
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
High Road to the Future?
Last month, I had the pleasure of reading the draft manuscript of a new novel by the Glaswegian speculative fiction writer, Douglas Thompson. Entitled Barking Circus, the novel uses a variety of narrative techniques to offer a compelling and original portrait of Glasgow through time. Part memoir, part satire, part personal crusade, Barking Circus is a high point of Thompson’s work to date, building upon and strengthening the metafictional approach he uses in earlier novels such as Ultrameta and Sylvow to create a tapestry effect – or, in Thompson’s words, a quantum narrative – that is simultaneously intimate and vast.
One of the key sections of Barking Circus is entitled ‘Newayr’, a future dystopia in which the citizenry of a devastated Glasgow has been deported to the far north of Scotland and placed under observation in various isolated communities, the purpose of this outlandish experiment being to discover, over a period of generations, whether the primal impulse of humanity is to build or to destroy. A shorter version of ‘Newayr’ was originally published in the 2013 Eibonvale Press anthology Caledonia Dreamin’, a collection of new Scottish speculative fiction edited by Hal Duncan and Chris Kelso, with each of the tales directly inspired by a word or words in the Scots language. One of the leitmotifs of the volume as a whole is the personal and public instability generated by social inequality, in its various forms. After returning from a week in Scotland and still thinking about Thompson’s book, I found myself wondering if Scottish science fiction in general has shown a greater willingness to engage with political themes than its English counterpart, a greater radicalism even.
Certainly the most inspiring literary event I have ever attended was a panel at the Montpellier literary festival a couple of years ago, where I had the thrill and privilege of hearing James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Alan Warner and Louise Welsh dispute and discuss the evolution and relevance of Scottish writing in the landscape of contemporary literature. The fearlessness and passion of these writers in speaking their minds seemed a far cry from most of what is on offer at the blandly commercialised Hay Festival these days. Above all, these writers left their audience in no doubt of their firm belief that writing matters, not simply as an entertainment or pastime but as a political act. In the current political climate, where the differences between English and Scottish political culture appear stark, to say the least, they would surely agree that it matters more than ever.
This most recent trip to Scotland prompted me finally to get to grips with the mighty Lanark, Alasdair Gray’s first novel and a key work of speculative fiction that has been on my ‘to read’ list for years. At the time of writing I am roughly halfway through the book and in love with its directness, a literary radicalism that is able to mix heartfelt sincerity with intellectual rigour and reach perfect accord
(or, given Lanark’s fearless expressionism, should I say discord?). It is this perfect synthesis of heart and mind that Douglas Thompson is clearly aiming for – and, I would say, attaining – in Barking Circus, and I cannot imagine that he was not at least partly influenced in his endeavour by his fellow countryman.
At its heart, Lanark is a critique of the insoluble conflict between art and commerce. In a conversation with the eponymous Lanark, the priest Noakes begs the young man to pledge himself to the cause of destroying the sinister ‘institute’ that employs them both:
“Because it is mad with greed and spreading like cancer, because it is fouling the continents and destroying the handiwork of God! It is horrible for a priest to confess this, but sometimes I care less for those the institute eats than for the plants, beasts, pure air and water it destroys. I have nightmares of a world where nothing exists outside our corridors and everyone is a member of the staff. We eat worms grown in bottles. Between meals we perform Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with Ozenfant conducting, while the viewing screens show ancient colour films of naked adolescents dancing through flowers and sunlight that no longer exists.”
Reading Gray’s words on the day Theresa May’s Conservative government forcibly overturned the democratic decision of local councillors in Lancashire not to allow fracking in their county made them seem particularly prescient, especially given that they were written almost forty years ago.
If Gray was one of the first of the modern generation of Scottish writers to use speculative materials to critique capitalism and highlight the role of repressive governments in cementing structural inequality within society, he has certainly not been the last. Andrew Crumey’s distinctly Lanark-like Sputnik Caledonia (2008) similarly juxtaposes the Bildungsroman with future dystopia to reveal a world caught between 1950s Stalinism and the disparate and dangerous uncertainties of a future that has become regulated to a paranoiac degree. In Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, a fifteen-year-old girl brought up in the care system is kept under guard in the circularly structured prison of the title, reliving trauma and forming intense connections to her fellow inmates in a narrative that hints at the future but that is already being played out in our streets and cities. Fagan’s new novel The Sunlight Pilgrims heightens her use of science fictional elements, centring affecting personal narratives against the stark background of climate change.
Interzone #267 - November-December 2016 Page 1
