Interzone

New subscribers can get this issue free by using "IZ270 FREE" as their Shopper Reference during checkout.

Cover:

417h3r105 v3 by 2017 cover artist Dave Senecal

 

Contents:

 

Fiction:

Rushford Recapitulation by Christopher Mark Rose
illustrated by Richard Wagner

An eggbeater. An autopipette. A Texas Instruments TI-30 calculator.

When Connie Romanski’s water broke, Zack was working on his car, out under a sticky old hickory tree. He knew he had already made one mistake, and now he wasn’t going to get his Chevy Nova back together fast enough. He had bought the wrong gasket. After disconnecting the spark plug cables and half a dozen other connections, and slathering up that gasket with a drippy black sealant that smelled foul when it hit the hot engine, he saw it was never going to fit. Then he heard Connie’s shriek.

 

Like You, I Am A System by Nathan Hillstrom

I did it because I love you.

 

Dirty Code by Wayne Simmons
illustrated by Dave Senecal

He wakes in his own time. No alarm buzzing in his ear, no sun cutting through the glass. Just his eyes opening, adjusting to the half-light of the room and the woman beside him.

He rolls the covers back, sits up. There’s an old electric lamp by his bed and he flicks it on then walks across the room. Checks the mirror, turns his face this way and that. Everything’s there that needs to be there.

 

Encyphered by Jonathan L. Howard

“We all have our secrets.” How could his mother smile as she said such a thing? How could she smile as she roped his whole life around with steel cable and drew it tight?

 

The New Man by Malcolm Devlin
illustrated by Richard Wagner 

I used to write you poetry. I found pages of it in our bedroom, folded four times and tucked snug behind the bedpost on your side of the bed. I sat and unfolded the paper, spotted with grey circles which smeared and spiked the blue ink. The handwriting was mine, but the words were written by the person I used to be.

I set to reading them, but soon struggled. The individual words were clear, but they became lost in sentences which were difficult, lines that I couldn’t decode at all.

 

Evangeline and the Forbidden Lighthouse by Emily B. Cataneo
illustrated by Richard Wagner 

I read once that all over the world, people who live oceanside tell stor­ies about how their stretch of coast is haunted. Of course, I’ve never left the country, so I can only speak for the inlet where I once lived, Fox Sands. The local legend there concerns a lighthouse, a thin gray spindle on a handful of gray rocks, perched just on the edge of the geographical horizon. No one knows who built it, but its beam always sweeps the roiling ocean when storms march up the Atlantic, and the story runs that its keeper has lived there for centuries with a certain gift from the lighthouse: no crow’s feet, no ticking clocks, only climbing spiral stairs to the lantern room with knees and ankles that never ache, on endless day after endless day.

 

Memories of Fish by Shauna O'Meara 

The drone hangs, unmoving, above a wet, cement thoroughfare. The three-hundred-and-sixty degree image it feeds to The Tourist’s surround-screen is of a mountain marketplace near Bandarawela. Ground tarps bearing all manner of Sri Lankan fruits, vegetables and spices flank the rain-puddled path and, in turn, both hemispheres of his living room, the calls of the vendors in their sarongs, reddas and saris piercing through The Tourist’s audio alongside the scents of curry, cow-dung and damp vegetation called forth by the olfactory interpreter.

 

Black Static 58 Out Now:

Black Static is published at the same time, and in the same format, as Interzone. Issue 58 contains new stories and novelettes by Mark Morris, Helen Marshall, Joe Pitkin, Gwendolyn Kiste, and Tim Casson. Cover art is by Joachim Luetke and interior illustrations are by Warwick Fraser-Coombe, Joachim Luetke, and Vince Haig. Features and reviews are supplied by Ralph Robert Moore, Lynda E. Rucker, Gary Couzens (films) and Peter Tennant (books, including an in-depth interview with Richard Chizmar). To take out a discounted subscription to Black Static, or Black Static + Interzone combined, please visit this website's shop.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

New subscribers can get this issue free by using "BS58 FREE" as your Shopper's Reference during checkout. The same offer applies to Interzone (use "IZ270 FREE") and a dual subscription to both magazines (use "BS58/IZ70 FREE").

 

Interface:

Future Interrupted: The Incomplete Legacy of Racefail
Jonathan McCalmont

The shortlists for the 2017 Hugo Awards are set to inspire little except complacency. With the collapse of the Sad Puppies and their Rabid chums reduced to nothing more than a pathetic personality cult, it is tempting to view the Best Novel shortlist as a victory for the forces of progress: two-thirds female, a majority of black and minority ethnic writers, and two trans authors certainly makes for a diverse collection of talents when compared to a historical baseline that is overwhelmingly dominated by straight, white, cis-gendered men. However, while this year’s big winners suggest that genre culture is continuing to get better at recognising a diverse range of voices, we still have a long way to go before we can even begin to think of genre culture as having overcome its historic addiction to racism.

 

Time Pieces: All Over Bar the Shouting
Nina Allan

Although it is the controversies that tend to draw attention at the time, book awards are usually more interesting in retrospect, when the fuss has died down. It is only with hindsight that we begin to see if the outrage over the shortlist was in fact worth the word-count expended upon it, whether, in the broader sweep of history, the winning novel was actually anything more than a flash in the pan.

 

Ansible Link
David Langford

News, obituaries.

 

Reviews:

Book Zone
Peter Tennant, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Stephen Theaker, Duncan Lunan, Jack Deighton, Paul Kincaid, Juliet E. McKenna

Books reviewed include NEW YORK 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, NETHERSPACE by Andrew Lane & Nigel Foster, THE STARS ARE LEGION by Kameron Hurley, THE END OF THE DAY by Claire North, WICKED WONDERS by Ellen Klages, YOU WILL GROW INTO THEM by Malcolm Devlin (plus author interview conducted by Peter Tennant), WALKAWAY by Cory Doctorow

 

Mutant Popcorn
Nick Lowe

Films reviewed include GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT, THE BOSS BABY, GET OUT, LIFE, LOGAN, KONG: SKULL ISLAND, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, GHOST IN THE SHELL, POWER RANGERS, PERSONAL SHOPPER

 

How To Buy Interzone:

Interzone is available in good shops in the UK and many other countries around the world, including the USA where it is stocked by Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and elsewhere. If your local store (in any country) doesn't stock the magazine they should easily be able to order it for you so please don't hesitate to ask them. You can also buy the magazine from a variety of online retailers, or a version for e-readers from places like Weightless Books, Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, etc.

The best thing though is to follow any of the Shop/Buy Now/Subscribe links on this website and buy this new issue (scroll down to the bottom of the Shop), or better still take out a subscription (at the top of the Shop), direct with us. You'll receive issues much cheaper and much quicker, and the magazine will receive a much higher percentage of the revenue. Magazines like Interzone cannot survive without subscriptions, so thanks for your support.

Potential subscribers outside the UK should note that six issues of 12-issue subscriptions have absolutely no postage added: you'll pay exactly the same as a UK subscriber.

SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers can get this issue free by using "IZ270 FREE" as their Shopper's Reference during checkout.

 

Please Help Spread the Word:

If you enjoy Interzone please blog about it, review it, or simply recommend it to your friends. Thank you!