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“Love and War” by Tim Lees
“Age of Miracles, Age of Wonder” by Aliette de Bodard
“The Insurance Agent” by Lavie Tidhar
“Camelot” by Patrick Samphire
“The Upstairs Window”  by Nina Allan

Reviewed by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The issue starts off with a rather weak story titled “Love and War” by Tim Lees.  The tale of a woman serving a government run by “The Party” as they fight off an invasion of insect-like aliens labeled “Earth X,” the dialogue and plotting are solid, but the story suffers from a major flaw.  Lees fails to inhabit his protagonist such that she sounds and thinks like a woman rather than a man.  If you changed her gender and name, she could be a man, and it took a page or two before I stopped having to remind myself the narrator was a woman.

Aliette de Bodard’s “Age of Miracles, Age of Wonder” is far stronger.  The tale of a sun god who has become human and the former worshipers who are now torturing him as they prepare to kill him, the story is one of revenge, sadness, loss, and misunderstanding.  While the people resent the gods for all the sons and daughters they’ve been forced to sacrifice to them over the years, the gods resent the loss of their worshipers, whom they consider hopelessly misguided.

Bodard switches skillfully between four different point of view characters, with each offering a unique perspective on the story’s events.  The dialogue and characterization are strong, and, the result is a story which asks deeper questions about faith, suffering, oppression, and resentment, and how people respond to it in different ways.

“The Insurance Agent” by Iraeli writer Lavie Tidhar is the story of a private bodyguard (“insurance agent”) hired to protect Kim, a foul-mouthed, cocky alien goddess revered by many.  It turns out that instead of serving as her bodyguard, he’s been hired for an altogether different purpose.

While the dialogue and characterization are well done, the story suffers from the fact that the goddess evidences no redeeming qualities.  Why the main character would accept the mission is questionable, and why he didn’t quit the moment he discovered the deception is even more so.   He tries to cover over this with the Alien Theory of Spiritual Beings, but even the protagonist doesn’t believe in it.  In the end, the story left me wondering what the point was.

“Camelot” by Patrick Samphire proved two things to me: first, that the author has a unique perspective on the world, and second, that he has a love affair with the f-word.  Perhaps this is more acceptable among Brits than Americans, but I did find it distracting, particularly because his tale of a man looking for his brother’s corpse, which he believes he will find at a site he’s dubbed “Camelot,” is surreal and difficult to follow.  Some of this is purposeful, as it seems obvious the writer has left many things open to the reader’s interpretation. The main character, Sam, does have an intriguing series of encounters with a  mysterious woman who becomes his lover and seems to know quite a bit more about him than he knows about her.  Other parts of it I felt were more related to the writer’s style.  I also had a hard time figuring out whether the story was supposed to be fantasy, science fiction, or perhaps horror.  It doesn’t fit neatly into one category, but that’s not always bad.  

For readers who enjoy the mystery of shows like Lost and The Event, or even FlashForward, this story will likely be intriguing.  For those who prefer more straight forward story telling, you might prefer to read the other stories and skip this one.

Nina Allen’s “The Upstairs Window”is the second strong story in this issue.  The tale of a journalist whose life intertwines with his ex-lover and an artist, this one also leaves a lot open to  reader interpretation.  When the artist friend, Nico, gets into trouble, he prepares to flee under a false identity, asking for the protagonist’s assistance.  The protagonist debates getting involved but recalls their friendship over several years and gives him money to help him get on the train and start a new life.  He leaves behind memories and a letter for his ex-love, which the journalist then must deliver.

The dialogue is good.  The characters are somewhat interesting, but I never really got a sense of what the story was about, even after two readings, and I could discern no apparent speculative element to mark it as science fiction or fantasy.  The most I culled from it was that the protagonist was bored with his life, and, indeed, at the end of the story he does sell his house and things and moves away for a fresh start.

Not my cup of tea mostly, although I highly recommend the Bodard story.

"Mannikin" by Paul Evanby
"Candy Moments" by Antony Mann
"The Melancholy" by Toby Litt
"Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life" by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
"Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Matter" by Jim Hawkins

“United States of America” by Mario Milosevic
“Iron Monk “by Melissa Yuan-Innes
“A Passion for Art” by David D. Levine
“Plague Birds” by Jason Sanford
“Over Water” by Jon Ingold

“The History Of Poly-V” by Jon Ingold
“Dance Of The Kawkawroons” by Mercurio D. Rivera
“Chimbwi” by Jim Hawkins
“Flying In The Face Of God” by Nina Allan
“Johnny’s New Job” by Chris Beckett
“The Glare And The Glow” by Steve Rasnic Tem

“Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas” by Jason Sanford
”Hibakusha” by Tyler Keevil
“In the Harsh Glow of its Incandescent Beauty” by Mercurio D. Rivera
“Human Error” by Jay Lake
”Again and Again and Again” by Rachel Swirsky
”Aquestria” by Stephen Gaskell

Reviewed by Kathleen M. Kemmerer

“Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” by Jason Sanford
“By Starlight” by Rebecca J. Payne
“The Killing Streets” by Colin Harvey
“Funny Pages” by Lavie Tidhar
“Bone Island” by Shannon Page & Jay Lake

Reviewed by Carla Billinghurst

The selection of stories in this issue of Interzone covers pretty much all the genres from urban-horror to gentle fantasy.

“Bone Island”  by Shannon Page and Jay Lake is the stand-out for this issue, the story itself being the (fairly) straightforward tale of Cary Palka, every witch's favourite familiar, and how his devotion to an ancient duty embodied in his grandfather's stone axe heals the split between 'quiet' and 'noisy' magic and banishes two divided witches in favour of a psychically whole descendant.  What takes it to the top of the list is the writing: it's poetic, it rings and resonates with myth like a grinning smith belting it out on a magic anvil, and it gives a sense of the ancientness underlying our every footstep while at the same time making magical beliefs somehow graspable as real, not some strange misguided view of history.  The bones of the title are real bones but also the bones in limestone, the bone that rock comprises in the body of the Earth, and the bone of contention that a divided belief system fights over.  On a spooky, fog-shrouded island nothing is what it seems and yet every islander knows the intimate details of his neighbours' lives.  Things are left unsaid even when the surf runs with blood but the good guys win in the end – of course, that depends on your definition of 'good'.

“Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” from Jason Sanford is a haunting story that stayed with me long after the first reading.  It's urban SF with a neat twist on the alien-abduction theme and builds on the “what do you have that we might want?” trope of First Contact.  Deeper than that, it's an exploration of Art – how the process of creating Art is a taking apart and a putting together and that life, as an art-form, is necessarily change but some change we choose to reject because it truly is wrong.  So there's a bit of speculation in there, too, about the nature of evil.  The story is about an urban fireman whose wife has been abducted by Rippers, strange black creases in the air that lurk in the shadows, steal humans and, judging from the screaming, do unspeakable things to them.  His daughter eventually chooses to follow her mother into the shadows but her father resists and is left with a sense of hope that mother and daughter can change the aliens.  The central character is a fine blend of public service and private pain that we are used to from movies like Die Hard; doing good because he does but if you scratch the surface there are some firm moral principles in there.  It's about loss, as well, and how we cope, alone and together, with losing loved ones.  Its central theme is humanity's ever-present fear of what might creep in from the dark and more particularly what might creep in from the dark to do Bad Things to our teenaged daughters.  Stay in the light!

Lavie Tidhar's “Funny Pages” poses the question: could even super-heroes sort out the Arab-Israeli conflict?  The answer is a disheartening, if not unexpected, 'No!' but on the way to this conclusion the situation sorts out a few of the super-heroes! Tidhar jumps easily between comic-book adventures and political commentary; overall it's a light look at why people don't get on, be they super-heroes, ethnic groups or just the usual weak humans who can't resist playing out their own stereotypes.

“By Starlight” by Rebecca J. Payne is an excursion into a future world divided into grounders and the people who float above them on ships powered by starlight.  The world is beautifully drawn with a mostly mediaeval flavour to it. Our heroines try to earn a living from trade while grounders try to catch the ships and the sailors struggle with inter-fleet disputes and religious and territorial issues.  The main characters are two young women, one a slave and one from the wealthy classes, who have fled the traditional ship-board lives expected of them in a stolen ship.  Payne's piratical lesbians survive and eventually appear to be thriving in their world.  Of all the characters, the ship is somehow the most evocative as it limps along, injured, with an uneven pulse.  The relationship between the main characters is convincing and the whole adventure has a satisfactory conclusion.  It's a gentle story that doesn't grab you by the entrails and shake you, but that's not always a bad thing.

And talking of being grabbed by the entrails, here is Colin Harvey's offering, “The Killing Streets,” where gigantic,  hungry Snarks explode from under the tarmac to pounce on terrified pedestrians in a near-future dystopian London.  We experience a Snarks-eye view of chomping up humans and then meet Thom for his take on walking through London streets.  The regular rhythm of footsteps attracts the beasts so he sings and dances, a few nods to Dune here, with the schools using Thumpers to draw the creatures away at 3:30 pm when the kids have to catch the bus.  Then there is Blacktongue, another escapee from the government laboratories that brought you Snarks, and, it turns out, a disease that somehow connects Snark and potential victim so that they can sense each other.  Although the world created is convincing, there were some things in this story that were never explained; it felt as though it was an introduction to a longer, more complex story and Thom's touching belief that throwing himself to the Snarks would mean his evil wife Marian would keep her promise to look after Thom's girlfriend and her children didn't really ring true.  Nevertheless, it's an entertaining “what-if?”

“Sublimation Angels” by Jason Sanford

“No Longer You” by Katherine Sparrow and Rachel Swirsky

“Shucked” by Adrian Joyce

“The Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert

“The Festival of Tethsalem” by Chris Butler

“Butterfly Bomb” by Dominic Green
“Coat of Many Colours” by Dominic Green
“Glister” by Dominic Green
“The Transmigration of Aishwarya Desai” by Eric Gregory
“Silences and Roses” by Suzanne Palmer

“Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” by Kim Lakin-Smith

“Unexpected Outcomes” by Tim Pratt

“Lady of the White-Spired City” by Sarah L. Edwards

“Microcosmos” by Nina Allan

“Ys” by Aliette de Bodard

“Mother of Champions” by Sean McMullen

“A Clown Escapes From Circus Town” by Will McIntosh

“Fishermen” by Al Robertson

“Saving Diego” by Matthew Kressel

“Far & Deep” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

“Home Again” by Paul M. Berger

“Black Swan” by Bruce Sterling