ISSUE #265
JULY-AUGUST 2016
Publisher
TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
w: ttapress.com
e: [email protected]
f: TTAPress
t: @TTApress
Editor
Andy Cox
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Book Reviews Editor
Jim Steel
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Story Proofreader
Peter Tennant
Events
Roy Gray
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© 2016 Interzone & its 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
IF THAT’S THE WAY THAT IT IS by VINCENT SAMMY
karbonk.deviantart.com
LISA TUTTLE
interviewed by Juliet E. McKenna in Book Zone
INTERFACE
EDITORIAL
JO L. WALTON
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
ANSIBLE LINK
DAVID LANGFORD
FICTION
ALL YOUR CITIES I WILL BURN
JOHN SCHOFFSTALL
illustrated by Martin Hanford
martinhanford1974.deviantart.com
THE EYE OF JOB
DAN READE
illustrated by Richard Wagner
[email protected] (email)
BELONG
SUZANNE PALMER
ON THE TECHNO-EROTIC POTENTIAL OF DONALD TRUMP UNDER CONDITIONS OF PARTIALLY INDUCED PSYCHOSIS
KEN HINCKLEY
illustrated by Dave Senecal
senecal.deviantart.com
THE INSIDE-OUT
ANDREW KOZMA
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
warwickfrasercoombe.blogspot.co.uk
A MAN OF MODEST MEANS
ROBERT REED
REVIEWS
BOOK ZONE
books
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
films
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
DVDs & Blu-rays
EDITORIAL
JO L. WALTON
After two years of faintly fusty Hugo Awards, the announcement came as a breath of fresh air with a zesty tang. In June, at WisCon 40, Nalo Hopkinson launched The Lemonade Award, to be presented for kindness and positive change in science fiction. The trophy is truly sublime. Sublemon: each winner gets a sleekly fluted silvery Alessi® PSJS Juicy Salif Citrus Squeezer, a monstrous twelve-incher straight out of H.R. Geiger. When life gives you lemons, no one can hear you scream. Nalo Hopkinson should probably get the Lemonade Award for starting the Lemonade Award.
Meanwhile, signs of life are everywhere twitching. The Clarke Award, celebrating its 30th birthday, energetically contemplates future evolution. The new Eugie Foster Memorial Award plans to celebrate the best in innovative short SFF. Schneier and Quinn’s mathy analysis of mooted Hugo reforms show how things learnt in the context of fandom might have wider application. At File 770, Catherynne M. Valente and others toy with the notion of a new swarm of fine-grained smart prizes: Best Action Sequence, Best Twist, Best Ending, Best Villain? Best New Award? Call them the Spoilers, Bruce Baugh suggests: “Make the trophy like a sci-fi hot rod’s spoilers. Seriously.” On YouTube, ambient SFF love reaches dangerous critical density and the BooktubeSFF Award bursts into existence. And Sam Walton and I – from an original inkling by Ian Sales, and with assistance and dazzle from some dozen brilliant others – have created the Sputnik Award™. The winner receives a generously donated one year supply of Interzone. To delimit the Sputnik constituency, we’re adopting Valente’s procedure: “vote if you want, who gives a shit.” Voting is now open at www.thesputnikawards.com.
In fact, everything about the Sputnik Awards™ is open. It’s entirely experimental, and hopefully next year it will be a new experiment. We have settled on two themes to guide its evolution. One is social media. Literary awards build spaces where fun and interesting conversations can occur, right? But you can say that about a lot of stuff. Perhaps a more compelling analogy is with user-driven content ecologies such as TV Tropes or Wikipedia. We collectively get back what we collectively put in, but that content is incentivised and transformed by a carefully designed infrastructure. So could inputs be more varied than ‘books and votes’, and the outputs more varied than ‘cultural capital’? We’ll see.
The second is politics. In 1843, after Arnold Ruge overheard Marx and his friends throwing him shade, Marx wrote to Ruge claiming that, “Ruge babes, our task is the ruthless criticism of everything that exists, babes.” Later that day, he wrote Capital. With Marx’s maxim in mind, perhaps the Sputnik Award™ trophy should be an almost traumatically vituperative critique of the winning novel. It could be, in Theodor Adorno’s words, written “from the standpoint of redemption”, and embedded in plexiglass. Politics hasn’t decisively informed this year’s selection, but starting with next year, we’d like the Sputnik Award shortlist to give special attention to SFF with radical democratic themes, promoting social and economic justice, and celebrating not just individual freedom, but also collective freedom.
Oh and it’s Dungeons & Dragons themed, except with hedgehogs and stuff. It’s kind of dumb. Check it out.
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
Telling People What They Want To Be
The history of science fiction teaches us that a little social relevance can be a dangerous thing. Commercial science fiction did not come fully-formed, it sprang from a pre-history littered with prestigious ancestors who laid foundations, coined phrases, and paved ways. People like Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell prospered because they recognised the thematic links between this pre-history and the emerging crazes for popular science and amateur radio. These early fandoms provided editors with pre-existing audiences and commercial science fiction was born of the desire to pander to those audiences by validating their identities and telling them what they wanted to hear.
Leaf through a collection of old stories like Robert Silverberg’s excellent first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame and you’ll see that science fiction spent the 1930s selling fantasies of technical competence to amateur engineers. By the late 1950s, that audience had collapsed only to be replaced by a much larger audience made up of men desperate to forget all of the terrible things they had seen and done in Europe, Japan, and Korea. Ever happy to connect, science fiction pandered to those sensibilities and sold them war stories in which the enemy’s inhumanity justified any and all actions taken against them. When the Vietnam War divided America into two political camps, genre publishing sold Heinlein novels to the veterans who still believed in just wars and Haldeman novels to those who returned from war filled with alienation and guilt. Science fiction became a mass-market commodity by positioning itself somewhere between harsh reality and complete fantasy; pre-historic literary tools designed to open up complex worlds now served to simplify reality by knocking off awkward moral edges and producing moral fantasies that vaguely resembled the truth.
The commercial decline of literary science fiction stems from the publishing industry’s failure to recognise groups that were as vulnerable to exploitative pandering as the white, middle-class men of the 1950s and ’60s. Sure…the New Wave, Feminist SF, Cyberpunk and Paranormal Romance all found their audiences but none of those populations proved insecure enough to ensure the long-term finan
cial stability of genre publishing. Of course, it doesn’t help that the industry’s prejudice and self-regard also made it slow to react. Indeed, while genre publishing might have got in on the ground floor when it came to constructing the 20th Century nerd, it has now spent decades on the back foot, jumping from one collapsed subjectivity to another. What was Grimdark fantasy if not an attempt at pandering to teenage Dungeons & Dragons players that arrived decades after most of those kids had already grown up and moved on?
With sales of epic fantasy on the decline, genre publishing now finds itself in search of a new economic heartland. Given the similarities in subject matter, you would expect genre publishing to begin pumping out Young Adult novels but institutional sexism and general incompetence allowed genre publishing to miss yet another boat and now it faces the impossible task of imposing itself on a mature marketplace complete with its own imprints and hierarchies. Thankfully, the critical and commercial success of Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy revealed an emerging mass market for grown-up science fiction but with genre publishers still encouraging popular science fiction authors like Aliette de Bodard and Kameron Hurley to write fantasy novels, the race is now on to turn the old tanker around and become the imprint best able to bridge the gap between old-fashioned science fiction and new-fangled senses of self.
Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet was a small crowdfunding initiative until it was sucked into the gears of genre publishing by an unexpected nomination for best debut novel at the 2014 Kitschies. Republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015, the novel soon found itself on both the shortlist for this year’s Clarke Award and the longlist for this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. These nominations alone were enough to make Chambers’ book an important work of science fiction but there is no denying that it speaks explicitly to the now.
Small Angry Planet begins with its wealthy point-of-view character taking a job as PA to the captain of a privately-owned starship that builds hyperspace motorways for a polity known as the Galactic Commons. This captain turns out to be an ambitious man and his desire to upgrade his ship and pursue bigger contracts pushes him to accept a job that sends his unarmed ship and crew into a war zone. Despite much of the plot revolving around the desire to acquire and spend money, Small Angry Planet has no interest in developing any kind of critical distance from the social, moral, and psychological pressures that capitalism brings to bear. Small Angry Planet may be a novel about work but its vision of work is as much of a moral fantasy as Heinlein’s vision of warfare.
With the book’s plot, world-building, and set-dressing all trying very hard to pretend that the New Wave never happened, praise for Small Angry Planet has mostly accrued to its liberal politics and the fact that each member of the ship’s crew operates as a stand-in for a variety of marginalised groups. Thus, the protagonist is presented as being privileged by virtue of her planet-based upbringing while humans raised on spaceships are representative of a more numerous and less-privileged working class. From there on in, the representation grows ever-more awkward as Chambers begins carving up old stereotypes and stitching the pieces together to produce a variety of alien races and cultures. For example, there’s a race of lizard people who are more sexual and more emotionally-expressive than humans in a way that recalls racist caricatures of African American people. Also familiar are the race of technologically-advanced fish people who are enigmatic and delicately beautiful as per the orientalist fantasies that are frequently projected onto the people of South East Asia. The crew also includes alien twins who occupy a single identity because of a mystical virus that turned them into the skiffy version of an autistic savant and an engineer whose Luddite mother refused him treatment for Dwarfism. The list of recognisable identities goes on and on, each of them serving principally as an opportunity for the book’s privileged protagonist to win people over by learning about differing cultural attitudes to things like personal space and pronoun usage. It all seems amazingly sweet and earnest until you realise that this vision of workplace understanding is just another example of bad science fiction selling us a vision of the world with all of the uncomfortable edges sanded off.
At a time when professional spaces demand greater acts of ruthlessness and social spaces demand greater performances of righteousness, this novel tells ambitious middle-class people that it is easy to be morally righteous and politically progressive. Most people who are raised middle-class are raised to engage with society in a way that perpetuates existing hierarchies and so contributes to the grotesque social inequalities that define the capitalist system. The first step towards becoming a progressive is to recognise that the society that gives you wealth and status dehumanises others and that every step you take up the ladder is assisted by centuries of brutal prejudice. Chambers is selling a fantasy because in her universe you don’t need to check your privilege, make sacrifices, or work for meaningful change. You just turn up, behave professionally, use the right pronouns, and marginalised groups will literally fall over themselves to shower you with status, money, sex, and the kind of acceptance that is rightly denied to those who actively benefit from the immiseration of others.
Small Angry Planet achieves this fantasy by severing stereotypes from their real-world origins and projecting them onto a universe where fictional analogues of real identities are naturally occurring and not products of a pervasively dehumanising capitalism. By removing capitalism from the equation, Chambers creates a fantasy world in which you can be righteously progressive and unapologetically ambitious. Just as Heinlein once sold fantasies of righteous genocide to guilt-ridden war veterans, Chambers is selling fantasies of political correctness to people who yearn to be part of the solution when everyone from their parents to their co-workers expects them to grow up, behave and assume their place as part of the problem. Sometimes a little relevance can be a profoundly ugly thing.
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
Canon Fodder
Debates about what constitutes ‘canon’ are ten a penny within the science fiction community. Barely a week seems to pass without someone getting up on a metaphorical podium to insist that in order to have a valid opinion on the current field, any seriously committed fan will as a matter of course need to have read Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Campbell, Clarke. Such claims and counter claims are by no means confined to the SF world, however. Last month, students of English Literature at Yale University launched a petition demanding that English 125/6, a study module covering major pre-20th-century English poets and a compulsory course requirement, be dropped from the curriculum. “It is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might study only white male authors,” ran the text of the petition. “A year spent around the seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity…and creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of colour.”
As the petition gathered support from undergraduates and members of the academic staff, the backlash was inevitable. In an article at Slate, journalist and former Yale student Katy Waldman argued in favour of the English department’s current course requirements, insisting that “if you want to become well versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot… The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it”.
Waldman’s argument, that in order to properly appreciate the work of writers such as Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Wole Soyinka we must first steep ourselves in the language and literary values of Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare is a familiar one. The question of whether it is true is more complex. The line that most disturbs me in Katy Waldman’s response to the Yale petition runs: “the canon is what it is”. This statement would seem to suggest that the canon – that is, the list o
f works and writers broadly accepted as being ‘great’, and therefore having universal significance in the development and study of literature – is an objective fact, like gravity or the speed of light, and that anyone wishing to question its existence or makeup risks revealing themselves as a bit of a flat-Earther.
This is a worrying idea, to say the least. The overwhelming reason the canon “is what it is” has less to do with any objective standard of ‘greatness’ than with six centuries of social and academic investment in shoring it up. I need not add that the academics, scholars, churchmen and yes, even writers who are the canon’s staunchest supporters tend to spring from the same demographic as the canon itself.
Even Winston Churchill was prepared to admit that history is written by the victors. I wonder if he would have been as prepared to support the view that the western canon is largely the result of cultural imperialism. Looking back on it now, it discomfits me to realise that I emerged from school and from university with a very partial idea of the forces that shape literature – the social forces that hold a narrow band of accepted opinions firmly in place, whilst driving other voices underground or to the wall. There is an argument that says these issues pertain to history and sociology and not to literature, that the text is the text is the text. Which can only beg the question: which text, and more importantly, whose?
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 1
