REVIEW : Interzone Issue 211 (July-August 2007) - Michael Moorcock Special

25 years old this year, Interzone has long been a pillar of the British SF scene.  It has launched countless careers and generally helped ensure that British SF continues to punch above its weight in the global marketplace of ideas that is written science fiction.

It is also safe to say that Interzone and I have a rather... tense... relationship.

Back in April 2007, a discussion at the now sadly defunct Urban Drift forums about Interzone's review policy spilled over into what can only be called a storm in an internet teacup as Interzone editor Jetse de Vries took issue with our remarks about his magazine prompting him to attempt to justify a 350 word limit on reviews.  This then prompted Niall Harrison of Strange Horizons and Vector fame to take issue with some of the claims made by Jetse.  I then waded in and took issue with pretty much everything that makes up Interzone because, to this day, I could not make any logical sense out of the arguments attempting to justify Interzone's format.

My problem with the magazine at the time was that it seemed to be attempting to head in two different directions at once.  On the one hand, by virtue of being a magazine devoted to publishing short fiction produced by up and coming as well as experienced writers, it seemed to be setting itself up as a magazine for the hardcore SF fan.  After all, who else would care enough about SF to seek out a magazine that ran short stories by largely unknown writers if not the hardcore fan?  Meanwhile, on the other hand, John Clute's absence as well as the tendency to produce short reviews was justified in terms of populism.  Then, as now, I could not understand which demographic the market was going for as it appeared to be aiming for a group of people interested enough in SF to seek out unknown authors but fickle enough to be put off buying a short fiction magazine simply because it ran longer reviews.

More than three months after that particular argument I find myself sitting here with a copy of Interzone's Michael Moorcock Special and thinking that it's actually quite good.

The magazine kicks off with a guest editorial by Moorcock himself.  There are two things that are startling about this editorial.  The first is that it would be entirely inaccessible to anyone who was not actively engaged not just with the history of SF but the history of alternative literature as a whole.  Moorcock speaks at length about the New Wave and how he and Ballard decided to take up William Burroughs' banner and stage a revolution against mainstream literature's obsession with modernism.  There is little or no mention of Moorcock's better known series such as Elric or Hawkmoon and the tone is defiantly one of politically motivated artistic reaction.  Intelligent, well-written and funny, this editorial brilliantly encapsulates why Moorcock was such an influential and incendiary figure back in the 1970's.  This leads us to the second interesting fact about the piece. 

"The Rise of the White Shirts" could easily have been written thirty years ago.  Moorcock's rhetoric is inspiring but his beliefs are, much like Jerry Cornelius, out of time.  Like many of the New Wave writers, Moorcock's attraction to genre is separatist in nature.  Moorcock is attracted to the ghetto that is genre publishing because of his disdain for the aesthetically and politically corrupt mainstream.  Like the punks that so inspired the New Wave writers, Moorcock and his ilk wanted their own scene and if that scene grew from the literary leper colony that was SF at the time then so be it.  The problem is that we are nearly 40 years later and the mainstream's obsession with modernism is long dead.  In fact, going by the praise heaped on the likes of Ballard and Moorcock by the edgier mainstream critics and the likes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, modern SF actually occupies a corner in the multi-cultural postmodern community that is modern mainstream literature.  Now is not the time for separatism.  Now is the time for imperialism!  As much as I disagree with Moorcock's politics (and I don't think monetarism means what he seems to think it does), the editorial is unashamedly intelligent, challenging and fascinating.  It would also send a Stargate SG-1 fan running screaming from the building. The same is also true of Andrew Hedgecock's interview of Moorcock entitled "Staring Down the Witches".

Rather than going the traditional route of the questionnaire interview largely favoured by genre publications, Hedgecock writes an extended piece about Moorcock, peppering it with responses to key questions in the style used by broadsheet newspapers and music publications.  The questionnaire tends to be a safer bet for a genre journalist as it makes it easier to prep for an interview and it generally relies upon the interviewee to do most of the heavy lifting by providing interesting responses to pre-prepared questions.  Hedgecock's use of the more discursive and biographical approach pays off here as Hedgecock clearly knows a good deal about Moorcock and is able to coax some interesting answers out of him whilst writing elegantly about Moorcock's past triumphs.  Simply stated, this is the best genre interview that I have ever read.  It is simply mind-blowingly good and it really does justify the £3.75 on the cover all on its own.  Elsewhere in the magazine Hedgecock puts together an interesting interview with Richard Morgan that touches on a number of really quite critically intriguing ideas.

The issue then moves into three pieces by Moorcock himself.  First there's a moderately interesting snippet from a Mervyn Peake memoir Moorcock is working on which oozes 60's Chelsea Boho chic but seems less concerned with Peake than it does with Moorcock's memories of Peake, which is a slightly strange choice for an entire book.  The last of the three pieces is a short story full of literary jokes, references and time and universe hopping.  It's not exactly stunningly original by Moorcock's standards but it's pretty much the kind of piece you'd expect to find in a Moorcock special.  However, the most interesting of the three pieces is a section of a book that has yet to find a publisher.  A blend of Terry Pratchett's psychological anachronism and Stephen Baxter's interest in Roman Britain it features a Jewish merchant who takes up with Joseph of Aramathea's wife only to be cursed to remain alive in London for all eternity.  I really hope that it finds a publisher as it's incredibly funny and clever.

As ever, Interzone's short stories are something of a mixed bunch.  The best of the lot is Carlos Hernandez's "Exvisible", a story about a man who agrees to have his dying father uploaded into a computerised box.  The story is clearly intended to be all about the process of withdrawal people go through when a parent or a loved ones contracts a fatal illness.  We have the life-giving machines and mechanical processes slowly claiming the parent's body and the way that once someone has died their identity crystalises itself in our memories.  However, for all its clever intent, the story never quite delivers the key psychological insight or moment of drama that would take it from a merely good to a great story.  Instead Hernandez plays about with an entirely superfluous romantic sub-plot and a bisexual character who exists purely as a mouthpiece for Hernandez's views on bisexuality.  However, this weakness aside, "Exvisible" is full of nice ideas and does at least try to tackle a new and difficult subject.  The same cannot be said of the other three stories.  The weakest piece is Grace Dugan's "Knowledge" in which a student starts seeing numbers mysteriously counting down above people's heads.  All the ideas and plot twists are as you would expect them to be.  Aliette de Bodard's fantasy story "Deer Flight" is similarly devoid of any real surprises but it at least possesses a distinctive tone and setting that bodes well for any longer or more ambitious pieces that de Bodard might have in the pipeline.  The remaining story is a largely technical exercise by Ahmed A. Khan called "Elevator Episodes", only a page long it attempts to tell a story with each paragraph drawing from a different genre or literary idiom.  A little bit too clever for its own good, "Elevator Episodes" reminded me of  those philosophical answers to why the chicken crossed the road that used to be passed around between grad students or the kind of games you used to get in Whose Line Is It Anyway when people would have to sing about accounting in loads of different ways.  Cute but nothing to write home about.

One of Interzone's most enduring strengths in recent years has been its columnists.  Despite having not featured all that heavily in recent months, Clute is now back on board and his reviews are as infuriating and fascinating as ever.  A particularly choice nugget was uttered in response to Rebecca Ore's Time's Child :

What is really missing is any sense that familiarising the whole inner grammar of consciousness to an entirely new life is really any different from memorising a keyboard.

Similarly fantastic is Nick Lowe's Mutant Popcorn cinema column.  Lowe has rapidly established himself of one of the finest genre film reviewers, rivalling even the output of the better known Mark Kermode and Kim Newman.  His attempt to describe Pirates of the Caribbean 3 as some cultural watershed moment whereby mainstream audiences accepted geekthink is a joy and is a genuinely challenging idea given how easy to hate that particular film is.

Given Lowe and Clute's reputations, the remaining two columnists were always going to struggle to make their mark.  Sarah Ash's Mangazone proves that writing about manga for a wider genre audience is one of the tougher critical gigs on the scene.  Because manga is so distinctive and strange if you are too forgiving everything you write feels like a cop out and you find yourself endlessly writing "it's weird but that's manga for you" over and over again.  However, be too inflexible and you wind up on the equally unsatisfactory footing of saying "it's full of catgirl porn!" and never getting beyond that.  Ash is perhaps a little too charitable and lightweight for my tastes limiting herself largely to describing plot and making apologies for a book that includes pictures of naked "pneumatic" 13 year olds in a bath but writing about manga really is tough so I think she does okay considering the fact that she has yet to develop a strong and clearly individual critical voice.  The remaining columnist is a new arrival in the shape of Pigasus Press's Tony Lee.  An old hand and master of a number of website (that I happen to occasionally write for), Lee has some DVD reviews to deal with and while they're informative, insightful and occasionally scathing I think that Tony's column will improve as he becomes more and more used to the format.

In many ways, the reviews section sums up the Interzone experience.  Packed with content by well known and respected reviewers, there are a number of places in which the writers seem to be straining against the limitations imposed upon them by the Interzone review format.  Short and heavy on plot synopsis, the reviews frequently feature allusions to bigger ideas that deserve more space and time devoted to them such as Rick Kleffel (of The Agony Column fame) mentioning "the Augustinian concept of predestination" and Stephanie Burgis's idea that Steven "Malazan" Erikson is an unforgiving writer.  One can't help but read Interzone's reviews and suspect that they might be in the process of becoming something new.  Indeed, recently Interzone took on as a reviews editor Paul Raven, a long time friend of this site and one of the people who were in on the discussions surrounding the launch of Scalpel... whether the sudden change of tone of Interzone's reviews is down to Paul's input or the blogospherical kicking the magazine got back in April is unclear but either way I think the section seems a lot smarter than it was a year ago.

All things considered, this particular issue of Interzone was a fantastic piece of work; it was everything a magazine of its pedigree and history should be.  Moorcock's intelligence seems to have filtered through to every aspect of the magazine and the movement away from the traditional load of unrelated short stories and non-fiction really brought the magazine to life for me even if I did not necessarily agree with what was said.  While I will not keep my hopes up that the magazine will continue to operate at such an erudite and challenging level, I really think that this particular format works.  Having the issue follow a theme allows the magazine to shrug off the piecemeal and disjointed feel that it frequently has.  Providing a platform for authors to talk about their own work or the nature of SF also gives the magazine a "DVD extras" feel that can't help but appeal to anyone interested enough in SF to hunt down a short story magazine.  I really can't over-emphasise how much fun this issue was.

Comments

[Patrick H]

"Like the punks that so inspired the New Wave writers, Moorcock and his ilk wanted their own scene and if that scene grew from the literary leper colony that was SF at the time then so be it."

Dude, you surely know that ain't right! If anything, the reverse is true!

Patrick H

[Patrick H]

But aside from that, nice work, btw.

Patrick H

[Jonathan McCalmont]

That is the spin the mag puts on it to be fair. Moorcock paints himself and Ballard as not really being SF people except as a means of fighting modernism so it looks a lot like they kind of hooked their star onto SF without really being SF.

The truth of the relationship between Punk, SF and the New Wave authors is obviously more complex (partly because I think early New Wave was more prog rocky than punky... the punk only came later).

But yes, kinda and thank you :-)

[Patrick H]

Whatever the mag says, the dates simply don't work! The New Wave began (I suppose) when MM took over New Worlds in the 60s (64, a quick web search tells me) and was going hard at it on both sides of the Atlantic by 1970. Hell, the first Iggy Pop album didn't come out til 69!

It's definitely true, though, that New Wave SF had a (not particularly strong) influence on punk rock, largely via Hawkwind, who can kind of transcended the hippy/punk thing, largely by being a gang of anti-social druggies, but I think also via Genesis P Orridge, who was a big Ballard fan, and the Cyberpunks were self-consciously aping the New Wave writers.

As Ffor JB and MM not being naturally SF, I think that's probably true depending on your view of what an SF writer is. MM came from journalism and being a jobbing writer, and to an extent SF/Fanatsy was kind of thrust upon him by what editors were looking for at the time (he started out doing Tarzan and er... that detective whose name escapes me fillers). Ballard was more of a surrealist, and I think was attracted to SF because he could indulge his passion for surrealist imagery while still selling stories. However, one might argue that the surrealist and the jobbing writer (what one might unkindly call a hack) are a part of the SF landscape whatever they try and say.

I think there's an argument that they were before their time, though. Ballard is clearly the ancestor of Pulahniuck, Self or Easton Ellis, while MM will probably be most remembered for his contributions to the endless epic fantasy genre, sadly. I think his mainstream work is quite old-fashioned, actually: the Pyat Quartet is fantastic, but it seemed very much a kind of mid-century state-of-the-west kind of novel. He doesn't seem to have moved on much from the fractured narratives of 70s Cornelius, while Ballard was writing 90s fiction for at least a decade before his younger heirs.

Ramble ramble ramble. I haven't read Interzone for years, but I might pick this issue up.

P

[Patrick H]

Gah, Sexton Blake! Always remember this stuff seconds after pushing the "post" button.

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think you're probably right. The reason I didn't jump up and down about the "punk influenced the New Wave" line was that I wasn't sure about the later writers or possibly the American Johnny Come Latelys, but no... you're correct. New Wave is dark prog rock rather than punk. Even cyberpunk isn't that great a match despite the name.

Ballard is someone who I'd say is stuck at the moment. His last three novels have all been identical tales of bourgeois malaise turning to violence.

As for Moorcock, the short story included in this issue features a reference to von Beck, an appearance by Sexton Blake and gives off a huge whiff of the later trippier Eternal Champion stuff. If he wrote it recently then it's troubling as much like his editorial, it could have been written 30 years ago. It's good stuff though.

I'd definitely suggest taking a look at this issue. I've been really harsh about Interzone in the past but I just loved this issue.

[Patrick H]

"Ballard is someone who I'd say is stuck at the moment. His last three novels have all been identical tales of bourgeois malaise turning to violence."

It's true, but he is a million years old or so. He may well have done his dash, if he'd stopped at Crash, High Rise and... er... the other one, he would have been an Important Writer, but half a decade later we got Empire of the Sun and a decade after that Cocaine Nights. It's all cream!

P

[Jonathan McCalmont]

The age of the people invoked by Moorcock was definitely one of the things that I found most comical. Given the choice to write about anything SF related, Moorcock chose to vent his spleen about him and Jimmie Ballard taking on Thatcher's forces of Monetarism.

As Uncle Monty once said, there is little left now except vintage wine and memories.

Having said that, I absolutely adore Cocaine Nights. I re-read it every 3 or 4 years and enjoy it every time. Super Cannes was terrible though as it was not only the exact same idea it was practically the same setting and featured a remarkably similar cast of characters.

[Patrick H]

Yeah, I haven't bothered with Millennium People (or whatever it was called).

And MM does cling to his old resentments. A large part of the Pyat Books is pissing and groaning about the gentrification of Notting Hill twenty-five years after it's a done deal. (Still heartily recommend them, a million billion times better than the latest Eternal Champion pot-boiler du jour.)(Although I quite liked one of the recent Elric numbers, though I forget what it's called.)

P

[Paul Raven]

As flattering as it is to find you believe I could have had any noticable effect on the reviews section in such a short time, I must point out that I'm not yet completely in the driving seat yet, and the reviews in this issue were organised and edited by Sandy Auden, an exceptionally capable and lovely lady whose shoes I am desperately nervous about failing to fill.

But I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned that the reviewers are well-known and respected - they're all smart people with a good weight of knowledge and insight behind them, and that's what makes the section work. It is not my intent to fiddle with anything until I'm well and truly settled into the routine (which is a fair lump of work, I might add), working on the old adage that if it isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing. I've been left a legacy of great quality, and I'm not going to so much as lift the bonnet until I know every tiny noise the engine makes.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

That's a very diplomatic response Paul ;-)

I was just struck by how at odds this issue was with the slightly bland feel of a lot of the issues I had when I subscribed. I was also floored by how at odds this issue was with the admittedly defensive posturing we got in April.

In April it was all "we want a wider audience" and "people on the internet have no attention span" and now it's Bill Burroughs, modernism, monetarism and jokes about Joseph of Aremathea being a nutter.

It wasn't just that the tight focus got rid of the slightly piece-meal and bland feel that I find the magazine suffers from, it was just how unashamedly literary it was!

Great work though... now keep to that standard for the next 25 years and there shouldn't be a problem ;-)

[Tony Lee]

Thanks for mentioning my new IZ column, Jonathan.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

No problem chief... I enjoyed it.

[brian]

Nice,
I have gone through your article it is quiet impressive. by following some book review formats we will get good books to read.

[Tony Williams]

An interesting review - particularly since I have posted my own review on my blog (http://sciencefictionfantasy.blogspot.com/2007/07/interzone-211.html ).

It just goes to show how opinions differ!

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Tony :-) Yes... it's certainly interesting that you would love Knowledge. I really did think that that was by far the least interesting piece in the magazine. However, I wasn't hugely thrilled with Moorcock's short story on pretty much the grounds that you suggested (too much "why it's our old friend Sexton... hello Sexton!").