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Interzone # 211 - July
01/10/2007 . Source: Neale Monks 
bi-monthly magazine: UK publisher/editor address: Andy Cox, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB6 2LB. Price: £ 3.75 (UK) $ 7.00 (US). ISSN: 0264-3596. Buy Interzone in the USA - or Buy Interzone in the UK  check out website: www.ttapress.com
When 'Interzone' arrived on my desk I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. The print quality can't hide the fact that the magazine itself is rather short. For a whopping £3.75, it's easy to feel short-changed when you only get 64 pages to read. But as it turned out, first impressions were misleading and 'Interzone' turned out to be nicely put together, good value and, above all, highly entertaining.
For a start, there aren't that many advertisements. I write for a number of computer and hobby magazines with much higher page counts than 'Interzone' despite having a similar cover price. But where 'Interzone' scores is in having a high proportion of its relatively fewer pages given over to ads or press releases. By my reckoning, out of 64 pages, advertisements only accounted for about two pages in total. In other words, you're getting a lot for your money.
But is what you're getting any good? Generally, yes. With these mixed focus magazines there's always the risk of some articles being of less interest than others. But, for the most part, people who enjoy SF at least on a casual basis, tend to enjoy fantasy literature, too, and vice versa. So that caveat aside, most readers will probably enjoy the blend of the two subjects within the one title.
The content is a mix of new fiction, art, book reviews, interviews and feature articles. This particular issue ran a number of pieces about and by the prolific and highly influential British SF author Michael Moorcock, including an interview, a short story and an essay by Moorcock on Mervyn and Maeve Peake.
Besides the two pieces of Moorcock fiction, this issue of 'Interzone' featured four short stores, three SF ones and a single fantasy piece. All were above average in quality, but 'Exvisible' by Carlos Hernandez and 'Deer Flight' by Aliette de Bodard really stood out as engaging tales that helped me while away the hours while I was sitting on a slow train from Paddington to Taunton. 'Exvisible' was a Kazuo Ishiguro-like tale blending SF with human psychology, positing a world where the terminally ill could be placed, a limb or organ at a time, into mechanical bodies until they were finally ready to be downloaded completely into computerised boxes. 'Deer Flight' was classic fantasy fiction but with a nice whodunit twist at the end that made it a perfectly satisfying read.
The artwork that accompanies the fiction was good as well. Warwick Fraser-Coombe's illustration for the 'Exvisible' short story in particular being remarkably shocking and effective. I was also rather taken by the cover art, depicting as it did a super-detailed spaceship in the same sort of way as artists like Chris Foss and Jim Burns did with their paintings back in the 70s and 80s.
The back end of the magazine is devoted to a nice selection of reviews, spanning movies, comics, DVDs and, of course, books. For the most part these are in-depth though variable in length, and generally intelligent and helpful. The material covered is hard and softcore in its range, from 'Charmed' at one end to 'Black Man' at the other, so there'll be at least a few reviewed items in there of interest to most readers.
Bottom line, 'Interzone' is nicely produced, good-value SF/fantasy magazine with lots of content across a range of genres. Definitely worth trying out next time you're looking for something to read on the train or plane.
Neale Monks
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