I bought these back when I was trying to get a handle on the current state, as was, of the science-fiction short story. I went to Borders on Tottenham Court Road one Saturday afternoon and came back with the latest issues of Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and Interzone. Of these four, Interzone was the only homegrown publication, the others being American, and I'm afraid it didn't make much of an impression on me beyond that I liked it more than Analog - which isn't saying a lot. I'd hoped it would blow me away because, being English, I was rooting for the home team.
Revisiting issue 217 fifteen years later, I find that my initial impression remains more or less unchanged. There's nothing actually bad here, and it has its good points, but somehow it's difficult to get excited about any of this. A Google search for Karen Fishler, whose Africa somehow warranted the front cover, brought up only dimly related hits, mostly former readers opining that Interzone was way past its best and subscriptions would not be renewed. These gripes were from 2004 from what I could tell, so I don't know if this issue was more of the same, or even representative of a return to glory.
To get the grousing out of the way, the art is mostly knocked up on a computer and faintly unpleasant in the same way as early seventies art from that year when everyone discovered the airbrush, but never mind. The fiction is mostly decent, or at least readable. The aforementioned Karen Fishler's Africa reads somewhat like Jack Kirby at his most portentously cosmic without the pictures, which doesn't quite work for me. Paul G. Tremblay's The Two-Headed Girl and The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain by Jason Sanford are both engagingly weird, but probably not quite enough to justify second or third helpings. Only Paul McAuley's Little Lost Robot had enough zing to pin his name to my inner corkboard for future reference. If Fishler was channeling Kirby, then Little Lost Robot has a strong hint of Pat Mills in its DNA and seemed to warrant my picking up his novel, Whole Wide World when I chanced upon a copy. I'd read his Eye of the Tiger a few years earlier and thought it was complete bollocks, and Whole Wide World was unfortunately not all I'd hoped it might be; so the best thing here is also the best thing I've read by an author whose work I haven't otherwise enjoyed - which hardly seems like a recommendation.
The review section devotes more pages to film and telly than seems entirely warranted, although said reviews are at least well written, beautifully argued, and certainly a cut above the mumbling generally found in the back pages of other digest magazines*; and Torchwood gets a filetting so thorough that I punched the air.
Sorry kids, but it was fucking garbage and anyone who enjoyed it should feel bad about themselves.
Actually, I'm not sorry in the slightest.
Despite the above, I somehow dutifully picked up the issue which followed, and despite the wonderful cover art by Warwick Fraser-Coombe, it's taken me fifteen years to get around to reading the thing - which is probably the fault of the previous issue.
Anyway, for what it may be worth, 218 is a little more convincing than 217, comprising six short stories which at least rate better than not actually bad - although Hannu Rajaniemi's His Master's Voice admittedly felt somewhat like every other box-ticking cyberpunk page filler I've ever read. This one was a Chris Beckett special, so we get three from him along with an interview which, I felt promised a lot more than his fiction delivered. It sounded great, but didn't quite come together in the pages which followed, although it's difficult to say quite why in so much as that Beckett's writing clearly did everything promised on the tin. My best guess is that it somehow felt like science-fiction written by a social worker, that being the author's day job. All the same, Rat Island, the last of the three, probably would have won me over had it been reproduced in isolation; or would have inspired a more vigorous winning over, I suppose I mean. There's enough here to warrant the assumption that he may well have written something amazing at some point.
*: Probably also a cut above the mumbling you're reading right now.
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