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Interzone 198 - May/June 2005
01/07/2005 . Source: Rod MacDonald 
magazine: UK publisher/editor address: Andy Cox, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB6 2LB. Price: £ 3.50 (UK), $ 6.00(US) ISSN: 0264-3596. check out website: www.ttapress.com
Another issue of this well known magazine makes its way to the subscribers and news stands. A couple short of its double century, it has been around a long time, weathering many storms including a change of publisher only last year. Having followed its progress closely, I can now confirm my belief that 'Interzone' is getting better and better.
Years ago, there were good stories but plenty of bad ones, too. Some were pretentious, almost too clever for their own good to the extent that they were intelligible only to certain people. Then there was that awful cyberpunk stuff which left many readers cold! Now, with good marketing, we have stories which have a broader appeal, are not downmarket and don't pander to the lowest common denominator. I think the editors are getting it right!
Hell...all this sycophantic stuff isn't me. I'd better get on to describe the recent issue. Well, it has five substantial stories, each one something you can get your teeth into, all accompanied by very good artwork.
Matthew Hughes has produced a quite exceptional piece. Called 'Go Tell The Phoenicians', it takes us to an interstellar trading empire run by an authoritarian and autocratic Earth. In this constrained society, everything is run by the book and every encountered situation has a predetermined plan of action waiting to be implemented. The main character, Kandler, has his place in the hierarchy. It's his job to suss out new extra-terrestrial civilisations. He's only as good as his last success and the price of failure is a menial, backbreaking job fishing for seaweed back on Earth.
His superior is a jobsworth by the name of Livesey but they all quake in fear of Sector Administrator Stavrogin. A real bastard, he once rejected one of Kandler's meticulous reports and made him rewrite it just to show who was boss (there's worse than uncle Geoff out there). Everything goes well until they meet an alien race.
The K'fondi defy definition. All robotic attempts of surveillance mysteriously fail, necessitating a direct landing on the surface. They are ushered to the smallest continent and told not to deviate from this area but the K'fondi themselves seem immature and incapable of doing nothing more than fun activities. They get by on perpetual hedonistic pleasures and a vocabulary hardly exceeding one thousand words but the world is a high-tech civilisation equivalent to earth except for the warp drive.
This beggars the question...who is in control? Kandler goes off on his own to find out. He does discover the answer to this question but you'll have to read the story to find out for yourself.
In many ways, Phoenicians reminds me of Eric Frank Russell's work and philosophy. To see a society and all its peculiarities from without is an interesting experience, especially when that society is your own. The process of taking a step back is one we and world leaders should attempt more often. A very good story.
The next story to mention is 'The Clockwork Atom Bomb' by Dominic Green. The aftermath of a future Africa ravaged by war is the scene in which Mativi finds himself. A sort of United Nations chappie, he is responsible for the management of nasty unexploded bombs that are to be found in abundance in the Congo. Things are so bad that reconstruction is carried out by robotic machines which are expendable, likewise the new inhabitants who may be unfortunate enough to step on a mine.
A girl takes him to a new menace. This is a device, rather like a dustbin or a Dalek in shape which can make people disappear. They can also be used as an electricity source but unknown to many is the fact that they are powered by singularities or small black holes. Though this latter bit of information was difficult to accept, it did make for an interesting story in that, in all likelihood, they would be responsible for destroying everything in the near future.
The Africa of today is much like Green's Africa where events control people and no matter how much they try to change things, the unmanageable and the inevitable always occur. Chaos leads to more chaos - eventually all are doomed. The warning is to stop it now before this happens in the future.
Christopher East provides a new look at the Battle of the Bulge in his 'Bastogne V 9' then gives us another version of reality, again and again. An interesting story, it takes us to the horror of war and beyond.
The other stories were Chris Beckett's 'Piccadilly Circus' and 'The Court Of The Beast Master' by John Aegard. While the first mentioned didn't appeal to me personally, it was nonetheless a well-crafted story which had an interesting plot. The other was fantasy orientated and the best I've read in this genre for eons. I don't read much fantasy, of course, but that's irrelevance.
The usual columns completed the line-up for this issue. All things considered, IZ is on an upwards surge. There are many good stories out there looking for a home and it's the editors' job to choose them and still make the concern financially viable. Some purists would scoff at the last point but if a magazine doesn't make money it will disappear and then there will be no stories, good or bad.
Rod MacDonald
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