Interzone #248 (Sep-Oct 2013)
Stories by Carole Johnstone, James Van Pelt, Sean McMullen, Greg Kurzawa, Ken Altabef, with Johnstone the pick of the bunch sf-wise.
Reviewing short SF since 2000
Stories by Carole Johnstone, James Van Pelt, Sean McMullen, Greg Kurzawa, Ken Altabef, with Johnstone the pick of the bunch sf-wise.
McMullen captures the tone nicely, the story reading like a Conan Doyle story, as a young man who sees the future as being with electricity and not steam, finds his future quite, quite changed.
After a couple of weak opening stories, the issue gathers momentum to become an excellent final issue for 2013. Shame about the cover.
A clever, layered story that mixes technology and sociology and economics and human behaviour.
Take a deep breath and read it now. If you don’t read it now, you’ll be able to pick it up in one of the Year’s Best anthologies next year.
Brin gets the Twelve Tomorrows anthology off to a good start – packing a lot into a short story that has augmented reality and societal changes they bring about as a key element.
A new publisher (Tor), a new size (Trade Paperback), and Hartwell is the solo editor (no Kathryn Cramer).
A plot summary of a three Act space opera opera. I’m thinking that someone should write the libretto properly, maybe as something like Britten’s ‘Billy Budd’, but for heaven’s sake not a D’Oyle Carte Gilbert and Sullivan ‘opera’.
Further adventures of Jack Shade, who is reluctant to take on a client, until he finds out who the client’s mom is.
A classy story from Kress, as is often the case. It’s a story that could have been written by James Tiptree Jr., and there’s no finer praise I can give.
Grossbach spells out the dangers of increasing reliability on technology, and spending too much time staring at a small screen rather than engaging with others directly.
Palwick provides an alien perspective to human colonisation, through Llhosi, a protagonist with a somewhat unctious, Harry Potter Dobbie-esque, narrative style.
An SF story for those of you who like your SF in deep space, dirty, sweaty, corrupt and cynical, and with a clever story structure. Hold on a minute. That’s me!
Another excellent collection from Whates and from Solaris, with only a couple of weaker stories. May this editor/publisher combo live long and prosper.
A story that is mostly internal to the protagonist : her thoughts, dreams, nightmares, hopes. Not a story with a simple storyline, and it’s ambiguous, and all the better for it.
With all manner of things possible with body modification, and I mean all things, this is a complex, dense story of flight, with layers within layers, of who is what, or why, or when.
Just a couple of pages long, and after the story is set up we quickly come to a conclusion that has no surprises for the regular genre reader.