Interzone #209 -- The 25th Anniversary Issue

Last week, Interzone #209 was mailed out to subscribers and sent to the distributors. It marks the magazine's 25th birthday, and we've tried to do her proud. An all-British fiction line-up in the paper edition (with a 50/50 split between established and upcoming authors), complemented with a free PDF of Ed Morris's "Journey to the Center of the Earth", interviews with Hal Duncan and Kim Stanley Robinson, the usual non-fiction, the Reader's Poll, and a Jim Burns cover.

Throughout the anniversay year there will be two '25' columns: 25 IZ in which various editors and authors comment on the magazine's first twenty-five years, and 25 TV in which a different columnist comments on her/his personal genre highs, starting off with Stephen Volk on 25 years of genre TV.

Personal favourites in this issue are Hal Duncan's "The Whenever at the City's Heart" (which I think is phenomenal, a true tour de force), Al Reynold's "The Sledge-Maker''s Daughter" (with a great Jesse Speak illo) and Ed Morris's "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

"The Whenever at the City's Heart" is part of Al's (yes, his real name is Al) The Book of All Hours, encompassing his novels Vellum and Ink and a four story cycle of which "The Whenever..." is a part.
Those four stories are (in chronological order):

• "The City of Rotted Names" Grendelsong chapbook, illustrated by Gabe Chouinard (slated for May 2007);
• "The Prince of End Times" Solaris Book of New Fantasy (slated for December 2007);
• "The Whenever at the City’s Heart" Interzone #209 (you know you want it...;-);
• "The Tower of Morning's Bones" Moonlit Domes anthology (slated November 2007);

If the other three stories are only half as good as 'WatCH' (you don't think Al would 'code extra meaning into titles', would you?), then you should go out of your way to get them. I already ordered the Grendelsong chapbook, and will buy both the Solaris Book of New Fantasy (I already have the SF counterpart) and the Moonlit Domes anthology.

I actively solicited this story from Al at last year's FantasyCon in Nottingham, and I'm very happy that I did. Should make Year's Best's ToCs, but of course I'm prejudiced.

Ed Morris sent me "Journey to the Center of the Earth" during one of the email reading periods. All 24K of it. I looked at the length of this one (officially we have a 15K cap), shook my weary head, and thought: Ed, this had better be better than sliced bread. Then I read the novella, was completely enchanted, and thought Who needs sliced bread, anyway? I forwarded it to my colleagues, who were just as enthusiastic about it as I was.

Since a 24K story is very difficult to place in a 64-page, A4-sized illustrated magazine we decided to release it as a separate PDF for the special occasion.

So enjoy!

Update: the first review is already posted, thanks to the folks at Tangent Online. So check out the review of IZ #209, and the separate one for the "Journey to the Center of the Earth" PDF, and see that I'm not the only one who's enthusiastic about the Hal Duncan and Ed Morris stories.

Update 2: an article of SciFi Wire on IZ's 25th anniversary, courtesy of John Joseph Adams.

Update 3: an interview with Alastair Reynolds on the same topic on the SFX site.

HUB #2 Is Released

With my story "Transcendence Express" as lead story.

Hallelujah!

This is the first time that the artwork for a story of mine is used for the cover, and the artist is nobody less than the very talented Vincent Chong. Vinnie has done quite a bit of artwork for both TTA and Interzone (amongst many others), and I'm flattered that Lee Harris chose him to illustrate my story.

For my money, he captured the essence of the story beautifully. Now I can be a little bit less jealous of Paul Meloy.

Check out HUB #2 on the HUB website (I enjoyed Sarah Edwards' "Talent Search" and David Viners' "Eight Excerpts from a Secret Interdimensional War" so far, and hope to read the rest soon), and consider buying a single copy (either the paper version or a PDF), or subscribing.

DeathGrip: Exit Laughing

Catching up with early 2007 so that -- for me -- this blog more or less started on 2007, I have to dip into late 2006. November 2006 DeathGrip: Exit Laughing was eventually released. It contains my story "The Ultimate Coincidence".

So why blog about it now? Well, simply because I received my contributor copies only last Friday. I did order four extra copies, which probably complicated things, and I'm sure Walt Hicks (publisher/editor) did his damnedest to get the books across the pond.

This anthology was, as far as I could see, quite a difficult project, and is most probably the very last publication from Hellbound Books. In his last email to me, Walt mentioned that he was closing down the Hellbound domain, so this will, very unfortunately, be another genre publisher that bites the dust.

This is a shame: while horror is certainly not my main staple of reading, I think we need as many quality publishers as we can get in the genre, and judging by DeathGrip: Exit Laughing Hellbound was a quality publisher, also selling their paperbacks for a fair price (10 dollars).

I greatly enjoyed working with Walt, especially as my story must have been hell to typeset. Still, with the help of Pete Tennant's proofreading skill (I'm sending him one of the copies) we got it done, and I'm delighted by the end product.

However, that it is the last book from Hellbound leaves a bad aftertaste.

What baffled me even more is that my story is not horror, not by a long shot (unless you find a couple of deadhead, hippies-après-la-lettre detectives horrific), so Walt obviously bought this one for its humourous qualities.

Humour is *very* subjective: what I find funny might be boring (or even insulting) to others. The basis of the story is the notion that time travel is, if not implicitly impossible, then at least extremely impracticable. So I figured, that to have an actual working time machine, one would need not only incredibly advanced technologies, but also a certain type of black hole, and getting these all near Earth would be such an enormous long shot that one would need 'The Ultimate Coincidence" to make it happen.

And so I did. In the process, I tried to tackle a plethora of clichés both in- and out of the SF genre, heavily satirising Al Reynold's "Diamond Dogs" -- a story I highly admire -- in the process (I'll be sending Al a copy, as well).

So, if gonzo SF satire fuelled by neigh-impossible cosmic coincidences amidst heavily spoofed infodumps (if there's anything serious in the story, then that is not intentional), then check this one out.

Also, you could do worse than support both Walt Hicks and Neil Clarke (who suffered a recent family tragedy) by buying a copy of DeathGrip: Exit Laughing through Clarkesworld Books. And if they sell out, try Shocklines.

Update: it *is* already sold out at Clarkesworld Books. So buy something else from Neil, like the Amityville House of Pancakes, vol 1 (which contains my novella "Cultural Clashes in Cádiz, that features the same characters as in "The Ultimate Coincidence"), TEL : Stories (edited by Jay Lake, with "Gaudí, Cons & Spires"), Midnight Street #5 (with "Near Absolute Zero"), or even In the Outposts of Beyond (with "Bridge Across Forever", my first published story, and it shows, but what the hell).

Interzone #208

OK: so Interzone #209 — the 25th Anniversary issue — has already come out. Nevertheless, since this is my personal blog, I'd like to mention that Interzone #208 (pictured left) was the special 'sense of wonder' issue, for which I selected the stories and did the editorial.

Publication-wise, this was my first big event of 2007. Needless to say, I absolutely adore the issue, and I have fond memories about almost every story. Nevertheless, we did struggle quite a bit to get this 'sensawunda' issue together, as it was not until the issue almost went to print that Jim Burns finally supplied the artwork for the Alexander Marsh Freed story (the artwork fell through with a previous artist).

The stories and artwork, and my personal memories of them:

• Softly Shining in the Forbidden Dark: when I read Jason Stoddard's story, I was swept away. However, the alien life forms on the planet Manoa were originally estera, that is: mats. Problem is, that it reminded me immediately of Greg Egan's story "Wang's Carpets" — a well-known, widely anthologised story. So I discussed this with Jason, and we did a rewrite, where the estera became palos (sticks), and other points were addressed (in the IZ team, I do the majority of the rewrites with the authors). That worked out real well.
• Then Andy (Cox) was wondering which artist would be suitable, and I suggested Kenn Brown. Actually, Mondolithic Studios is Kenn Brown and his partner Chris Wren, and they did a fantastic job. Initially, Jason was a bit lukewarm about it, but eventually he was won over, especially after Ken and Chris gave me two prints of the artwork on LACon IV.
• (NB: on LACON IV I threw an Interzone party, with which I had superb help from Jason and his friends from Centric and the Fictionados. The party was a great success, and Kenn and Chris attended, as well.)

• Empty Clouds: I lifted this one from the email slushpile, and while not everybody in the IZ team liked this one (our decisions are seldom unanimous), I'm happy that it saw the light of day. Funny thing is that Inspector Chen, as pictured in Doug Sirois's artwork has a red uniform, while in the story his uniform is supposedly green. A reader attended us on this mismatch on the TTA Boards, and I improvised by saying that the sand and duststorms around Bejing had coloured the Inspector's uniform. Now Gary Leeming owes me a beer...

• Where the Water Meets the Sky: Jay Lake's tale of a future that makes amends. I remember that Paolo Bacigalupi was looking for optimistic stories for the Summer Reading Issue of High Country — of which he gave a copy to me at LACon IV — and in that they mentioned that there were no convincing utopia stories sent their way. Paolo told me that the reader of High Country News are hyper-critical, and extremely hard to please. Still, I find that a shame, as there is a glut of gloom'n'doom fiction out there (Paolo being a main proponent thereof), and I would like to see more optimistic and realistic fiction (and no: those two words are not an oxymoron). I like to think that this story might have fitted in there.

• Islington Crocodiles: Paul Meloy has always been a TTA mainstay, and in the IZ team we thought that it was high time that he was introduced to a larger audience, and so we did with this story, his first in IZ. Admittedly, the change to the full-on visually spectacular finale after the character-rich, but relatively calm first half comes more naturally if you've read his previous stories in the Quay-Endula milieu (especially Black Static and Dying in the Arms of Jean Harlow). Still, Paul is a hell of a writer and a great guy to boot. And Vinnie Chong's artwrok is a feast for the eyes.
  

• The Star Necromancers: Alexander Marsh Freed sent this my way in the August 2006 email slushpile, and I distinctly remember reading it on a hot sunny day while I was taking a short break from a bicycle trip (I read all slush on a PDA). It was *very* hot, I was sweating like a pig, but when I started reading "The Star Necromancers" I forgot where I was. I like to think of it as Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" on a galaxy-wide scale: an understated sense of awe against the inevitable onrush of entropy. Jim Burns did a great job with the artwork, and saved our arses. Thanks!

Subscribe, or buy the issue at BBR-distribution (UK), or Clarkesworld Books or Shocklines (both in the USA). Of course, you can check out the following reviews first:

• Velcro City Tourist Board;
• Best SF;
• SF Revu;
• Tangent Online;
• SF Crowsnest;
  
• Internet Review of Science Fiction (in Lois Tilton's short fiction column of March: login needed, it's free);
• Whispers of Wickedness (a slightly different review: this one focuses on the artists)

And, finally, the discussion thread on the issue here.