From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:43:08 2004 Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 22:19:19 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Summary: Interzone, 2003 Summary, Interzone, 2003 The big news about Interzone this year is that after a couple of years of struggling to maintain a monthly schedule, they finally officially switched to bimonthly. This year there were a total of 8 issues -- the first 4 on close to a monthly schedule (with some slip), the last four bimonthly (though not always so labelled). This means that no SF print magazine is even scheduled for monthly publication. In 2003 Interzone published a total of 45 stories, 14 of them novelettes, for a total of some 306,000 words of fiction. One of the most refreshing aspects of Interzone is the writers they publish that no one else seems to. (Usually this is because the writers in question are from the UK.) Dominic Green is one such writer: I've been enjoying his stories for a few years now. My favorite Interzone story of 2003 was by Green: "The Rule of Terror" (May/June), a a nonstop cynical darkly funny novelette of a future dominated by constant terrorist threats, suicides for effect, corporatism gone amuck, and the decay of democracy as computerized voting machines are predictably hacked. A journalist befriends a refugee woman who, he slowly learns, plans a particularly spectacular suicide. At the same time he is fed clues to the voting machine corruption, and he is followed by a mysterious man with a blunt message for him. The story is certainly dark and depressing from one angle, but the deadpan telling makes it gaspingly funny as well. Green had two more pretty good stories in the magazine this year: "Heavy Ice" (March) and "Send me a Mentagram" (November/December). My other favorite story this year was "Birth Days" by Geoff Ryman (April), a short story about a gay man involved first in projects to "cure" homosexuality, then in more radical projects. Two other current "Interzone discoveries" are Daniel Kaysen and Tony Ballantyne. (Though Kaysen also had a story at Strange Horizons this year.) Ballantyne's best story this year was "The Ugly Truth" (September), a strong piece about an historian in a strangely different world who finds herself naively involved in political controversy. The story is interleaved with the origin myth of this culture, featuring a stranger coming to a beleaguered city and introducing social changes that allow it to resist invaders. The two combine to reveal a disquieting truth. Kaysen's stories were "Flights" and "The Director's Cut, Parts One and Two", both pretty good. The latter, about a colony of sorts, or maybe a TV program -- we are kept in the dark -- is interesting and scary in particular. Mat Coward is another author I've mainly seen at IZ (though also at Andy Cox's magazines The Third Alternative and Crimewave), and I quite liked his "By Hand or By Brain" (January), about attempts to unionize a call center -- and witchcraft. There were also two good, odd, stories by Paul Di Filippo, one of a small crew of American Interzone regulars. (Darrell Schweitzer, Don Webb, perhaps even Gregory Benford, would also qualify.) "Bare Market" (January) concerned a super-intelligent, computer-enhanced, incredibly beautiful girl who controls the planet's economy -- until hormone shifts when she has an affair mess things up. "A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled" (November-December) recasts Robert Frost as a bitter struggling horror writer and as a mentor to H. P. Lovecraft. Di Filippo has already written stories about Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson -- can an "Anthology of American Poetry" be on the way? I also particularly liked stories from Sarah Ash, Gregory Benford, Vaughan Stanger, and Nicholas Waller. On the whole, it was a fairly typical year for the magazine, frequency troubles aside.