Back in July, having previously launched a stream of invective at the editors of Interzone, I chowed down on a big plate of humble pie and admitted that actually... their Issue 211 Michael Moorcock Special was really something special. So... two months later, I picked up my freshly delivered copy of Interzone and looked forward to a decent read which, by and large, is exactly what I got... barring the "bloodstained cheese", the obsequious interviewing and a serious lack of cohesion.
I will start by dealing with the stories.
Feelings of the Flesh - By Douglas Elliott Cohen : The novelette deals with a monster hunter who preys upon different types of vampiric creature that steal people's senses. Desperately trying to track down one particular monster in order to get his revenge, the man encounters a girl who has had her sense of taste stolen. Upon reading the first page or so of this story and glancing at how many pages there were left I let out a deep rumbling sigh. The kind of sigh you emit when you know that the world is intent upon grinding you under it's steel toe-capped boot just to hear your bones crunch. Cohen is a competent writer. The action scenes make sense, there are characters that have distinctive voices and, aside from some hideously purple prose (including the "bloodstained cheese" line but there's also something in there about bruised phalluses twitching and someone's salty-tasting tongue), the story has a certain degree of shape. The problem is that there isn't a single interesting or fresh idea anywhere in "Feelings of the Flesh". The protagonist is mysterious and angsty, there's talk of revenge and lost love and the whole thing is held together by the idea of sensual vampires who can't help but remind me of Red Dwarf's altogether more interesting Emohawk who stole personality traits instead of senses.
However, despite being dull and derivative, I was willing to cut the story some slack seeing as it's clearly a bit of knock-about fantasy fun (and, as anyone will tell you, I hate fun) and it's Cohen's first published story. However, my problem with the story stems from the fact that while I think Cohen has his heart in the right place, I don't think that goes for his central nervous system. Escapist fantasy stories such as those telling of Conan, Solomon Kane or Dirzzt Do'Urden are almost in a genre of their own. They have no pretensions of being ground breaking art and they have no intention of challenging your fundamental values. They're just a bit of fun (as long as you ignore the racism). But there's something in "Feelings of the Flesh" that suggests to me that Cohen is not content with knockabout escapist fantasy. Indeed, a few sites have picked up on the fact that the story is reportedly about "the conflict between desire and instinct for individuals, and society, when change is necessary". Frankly, the story is about no such thing. You can feel Cohen grasping for bigger ideas throughout the story but it would take an incredibly charitable critic to read this story and conclude that it's all about the conflict between instinct and desire at a time of social change. In fact, I'm not even sure that that constitutes a coherent theme in the first place; don't instincts form a part of our desires? if so, how can there be a conflict and what is it about the conflict that changes at times of social change? you'll find no answers in this story... or even opinions on the matter. What works in this story works in spite of Cohen's attempts to be clever... not because of them. I think the sooner Cohen leaves behind the vestiges of his English degree, the sooner he'll find an audience that'll appreciate him for his real strengths.
Ack-Ack Macaque - By Gareth Lyn Powell : A young man is living with a Japanese Cartoonist, the creator of a biplane flying, cigar chewing cartoon ape. Suddenly, the cartoonist leaves the protagonist for a smug, handsome businessman who makes Ack-Ack Macaque a household name. This prompts our hero to attempt suicide and to wander round in a daze until the cartoonist returns and informs him that not only has she been dumped but an AI version of her cartoon character has escaped and is laying waste to the world around them.
This story owes its strength to the touching believability of a man who falls in love and then sees his life fall apart as he simply cannot come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend left him. We see the protagonist through a series of scenes wherein he attempts suicide and makes a spectacle of himself by begging his girlfriend to come back and taunting his ex's new lover. The SFnal elements of the fictional ape's adventures and the increasingly implausible, and possibly imaginary, events of the second half of the story feed the sense that the protagonist is slowly disintegrating both emotionally and psychologically. However, the inclusion of these SFnal elements make the story feel strangely up-beat and fanciful as... after all... it is all about an ape in a biplane, something that can't help but make you smile. The minor stylistic flourish of making the story feel upbeat is what ultimately makes it feel so intensely rewarding. It's something of an elderly chestnut to deal with a collapsing mind by introducing SFnal elements into a mundane setting but instead of leaving it there, Powell creates a fictional reality that might not only protect the protagonist by virtue of not being real but also by virtue of having the simple morality and feel-good ending of a colourful comic strip. Surprisingly thoughtful and emotionally intense, "Ack-Ack Macaque" is a lovely piece of work that is vaguely reminiscent of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of The World Blues. This was easily the issue's stand-out story as far as I'm concerned. Yes, it is that good.
A Handful of Pearls - By Beth Bernobich : A strange story that is set in a fictional world that seemingly differs from our own only in so far as its occupants have silly names, including "Meh" who is evidently not so much an expression of ambivalence as an object of desire. A group of scientists are on a remote island seeking out new compounds that might prove to be of some economic use. One day, the group come across a female child who appears to have had her tongue cut out. Before long, one of the scientists (with a history of unhealthy and abusive relationships) begins raping the child and then engineers her escape for fear that the other scientists take her home and teach her to speak.
I called this a "strange story" as Bernobich is not what I would call an easy read. The story lacks any real shape or structure and it is not clear to me what it is that Bernobich is trying to say. In many ways, I suspect that this is partly intentional and that the story is more of an anguished primordial scream than it is a reasoned critique of contemporary mores. For example, the protagonist rapes a child but feels no guilt... only irritation at the thought that the discovery of his actions might hurt his career. Similarly he is astonished when a female scientist says that she knows full well how he used to "bully" his former lover and that as a result she wanted nothing to do with him. On one level, the story is all about the way a sexual predator can paint themselves in a certain light and how polite society and the veil of privacy drawn over failed relationships can help support them in their belief that they're normal rather than monsters. However, on another level, I suspect that the child lacking a tongue is deeply symbolic of the conspicuously absent Meh, the former lover of the protagonist.
A "Handful of Pearls" is challenging, intelligent and it takes Interzone back into the problematic waters of child abuse. However, I can't help but wonder why it is that Bernobich decided to submit this story to a genre publication rather than a more mainstream literary organ. Bernobic is evidently widely published and has an imminent chapbook to her name but I can't help but wonder whether this story is not the work of someone who is not only a mature writer but a writer that is ready to mature away from genre altogether.
Dada Jihad - By Will McIntosh : Set in the same world as his award-winning 2005 tale "Soft Apocalypse", Dada Jihad is a tale of a slowly collapsing civilisation. Aware of this imminent collapse, a group of Nobel laureates have taken to organising acts of biological terrorism destined to "soften the fall" when that fall eventually comes. The story revolves around a doctoral student in biology who has become attached to certain members of the underground but, rather than throwing her all in with them, she chooses to keep one foot in both worlds by continuing to jump through the increasingly meaningless hoops demanded of all PhD students. This has lead her to become increasingly bitter and to focus this bitterness on her admittedly sleazy advisor.
McIntosh's setting is reminiscent of that created by David Marusek in his "cut-up" novel Counting Heads. Both futures are fractious places that resemble ours in some ways but with most of the institutions and social tribes disassembled and reassembled in ever so slightly different configurations. Both stories also revolve around groups of people who do not seem particularly important or even involved in any Earth-shattering capers... the stress is very much on the mundane, allowing the subtle exoticism of the setting to do the heavy lifting. Indeed, the focus of "Dada Jihad" is on the setting and the characters and how they interact. Such close focus leaves little room for substantial plot and this might prompt some to feel that the story is directionless or a "mood piece" but the quality of the characterisation and the intriguing nature of the setting are entirely deserving of their place in the story's foreground even if they do not produce anything particularly worth getting excited about.
The Algorithm - By Tim Akers : As with McIntosh's work, "The Algorithm" is a short story set in a world that has been covered in some of its author's previous works. This particular story tells of a society of men who collect cogs, gears and wheels washed downstream from a gigantic clockwork edifice known as "God". Taking this detritus as a sign from their god, the residents of this community strive to construct out of the wheels and gears a meaningful pattern through which their god might communicate with them. One day, a child is found amongst the detritus and some members of the community see her as a fraud while others see her as a prophet. Initially the girl is unclear about her past and it is not until she is grilled by the council of elders that her true nature becomes apparent and the community's options so obviously few.
"The Algorithm" is a well written and atmospheric story that oozes the kind of "it's a real weird place but weird in one particular way" vibe that you get with high-concept short stories. The characters are thinly drawn... this story is all about the setting and the ideas. The problem is that the ideas (clockwork aside) are rather facile and, as a portrait of the way religious communities operate, Akers offers us little that is new and a lot that is predictable. Once it becomes clear what the girl is, there is no shadow of a doubt as to what will happen. If this were not the fourth story set in the same world, I would praise Akers' inventiveness as "Veridon" (for that is its name) s an intriguing place but, having not read the previous three stories, I am not sure how much in this story is new and how much is old business. The idea of a clockwork god is an intriguing one and would be siffucient to carry a story of this length but if the only innovation is the religious community and the related plot I would argue that the story is insubstantial.
The stories dealt with I shall now move on to the non-fiction sections. This issue doesn't contain the Manga column that has graced Interzone's pages in recent months. Always a tough gig, it could well return later or have been silently gotten rid of, only time will tell but if it doesn't return then I think that Sarah Ash deserves some credit for seriously trying to open Manga up to the wider SF audience. With Mangazone gone, the magazine's non-fiction sections now have a nice feeling of symmetry with longer critical pieces backed up by shorter less substantial reviews.
Nick Lowe's Mutant Popcorn is as good as ever. Lowe refuses to bow to received or popular opinion and this issue sees him trying to rehabilitate widely derrided popcorn fodder such as Four : The Rise of the Silver Surfer and Transformers. The only time he puts a foot wrong is when he reviews Goro Miyazaki's Tales from Earthsea almost entirely from the perspective of how faithful it was to the books. Other than that, Lowe is his usual intelligent and playful self.
Lowe is backed up again by Tony Lee whose freshly named Laser Fodder DVD Review column does a great job of digging up lesser known genre outings that might not have made it to the cinema. Frequently given short shrift in prozines such as SFX, these types of films are frequently goldmines of unloved ideas and hilarious cinematic failures and Lee does a great job of bringing our attention to them. He even chooses to plow a similar furrow to Lowe in his short attempt to make us reconsider Star Trek Voyager, the most unloved of Trek franchises. Personally, I am still too horrified by the memory of the holodeck Irish village to follow Tony's example and re-examine the series. The wounds are still tender.
Over on the book review side we have the Clute's Scores. Nominally, the column is about Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird and Peter Straub's Sides but in truth, the column has the feel of Clute slipping his lead and heading for the conceptual hills. The review of Butcher Bird is little more than a rehearsal of Clute's ever expanding body of thought on horror literature which is interesting if profoundly flawed. Clute insists upon seeing horror as a form of fantasy but in doing so he ignores a lot of non-fantastical horror stories such as horror films that claim to be "based upon real events" such as Wolf Creek, Ils and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In his recent book The Darkening Garden, Clute rejects non-fantastical horror as "affect horror" and thereby shows his book-centric thinking but I would argue that any thought about the horror genre that does not put non-fantastical horror front and center is doomed to failure from the start. The second part of the column is perhaps one of the most remarkable pieces of criticism that I have ever read. Straub's Sides is a collection of essays and afterwords taken from Straub's many publications. However, in addition to this there is a 100 page satirical piece about critics and the book is evidently dedicated to John Clute. Clearly, the idea is that Clute is the target for Straub's satirical barbs but Clute does not really recognise this as a possibility. Instead he merely points out that the fictional critic must doubtless have landed a few palpable hits on Straub in order to merit such merciless lampooning. The result is a bit like two regency dandies firing insults at each other in a round-about manner whilst simultaneously attempting to not dignify the other with a direct response. This is hardly great criticism but it certainly is entertaining... get a room you two!
Interzone's regular book review section Interlocutions features an interesting selection of titles. Aside from Chris Roberson's Set the Seas on Fire (which gets a very charitable review given some of the other reviews I've seen, the reviews are all drawn from the high end of the SF market, including some non-fiction and critical works that suggest that Interzone is now happy being aimed at a "niche of a niche". Particularly worthy of your time is Rick Kleffel's insightful take on Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void (apparently Hamilton's SF is all about people fleeing hostile planets) and Lara Buckerton's stunningly high-minded review of Dominika Oramus's Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.
As should be clear from the above, I quite enjoyed this issue of Interzone. It covers a lot of ground in a number of interesting ways with the only downside being that the magazine feels very much like the sum of its parts. Without the kind of overarching theme that characterised issue 211, one can't help but feel that Interzone has become a series of small fiefdoms with everyone doing pretty much what they want to do with scant regard or interest for what's going on elsewhere in the mag. This is probably due to the fact that Interzone carries no editorial fat at all. The content providers are left to provide and the editor restricts himself to choosing the content without feeling the need to have his say or react to what's going on. Compared to the likes of SFX and Deathray, which place their editorial staff very much front and center, this gives Interzone a nice lean feel to it... no nonsense, just good SF and that's by and large what you get. With one notable exception.
In my review of Issue 211, I drew particular attention to how mind-blowingly good Andrew Hedgecock's interview of Michael Moorcock was. It not only brought the best out of Moorcock, it also asked genuinely interesting and challenging questions. This issue sees Interzone's interview feature move from the sublime to the ridiculous as Kevin Stone presents us with a creepily obsequious interview of Charlie Stross. I have a certain degree of sympathy for Stone as when I interviewed Stross I found him to be rather non-forthcoming but when you start an interview with the statement "You have some of the most inventive ideas in modern SF" you can't help but feel disappointed, particularly when the questions never rise above pedestrian fare such as wondering whether Stross' Laundry novels pay tribute to the work of Lovecraft.
I'm a huge fan of Charlie Stross. I love reading his books and he's one of the few authors whose books I systematically pre-order. I express that love by trying to engage fully with the ideas that Stross presents and this is why I was quite harsh towards his recent book Halting State as well as when I interviewed him. As a result I think that if you're going to interview someone, part of that process should be challenging some of their decisions, if only to see them justify them and thereby reveal their inner thinking. By asking questions you could probably answer for yourself after a glance at Stross' Wikipedia entry, Stone is not only failing to do himself justice as someone who writes about SF, he's also failing to do justice to Stross' words and ideas. All that was missing was Stone signing off by saying "A grateful nation thanks you".
"Clearly, the idea is that Clute is the target for Straub's satirical barbs but Clute does not really recognise this as a possibility. "
Surely he does, though. The first line of the review is "For reasons of decorum -- the book is dedicated to me -- I can't unpack all I feel about Peter Straub's Sides"; the last, referring to the closing parody, says "It is also a commentary on critics, even a dedicated one". Not that this detracts from the get-a-room-iness of the review, mind.
Posted by: Niall | September 30, 2007 at 01:21 AM
When I read that initial bit I didn't get the impression that Clute was acknowledging that the book was largely directed at him... just that he was accepting that the book was dedicated to him.
I just found it funny that Clute tries to treat the book as though he isn't the critic in Straub's mind... as though he is above responding to him directly.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | September 30, 2007 at 09:19 AM
Thanks for the review - I'm very glad you liked it.
Posted by: GLP | October 14, 2007 at 07:37 PM
Not at all... it was a pleasure. Best story I've seen in Interzone for a while.
Posted by: Jonathan McCalmont | October 15, 2007 at 03:00 PM