Month: December 2009

“A Clown Escapes From Circus Town” by Will McIntosh

IZ221 coverOnce upon a time (about three years ago), I wrote that the most characteristic New Interzone stories are not directly about different or potential worlds, in the classic way of sf short stories, but about “characters who have distinctly limited viewpoints of different or potential worlds” — and singled out Will McIntosh’s “Soft Apocalypse” (IZ200) as an exemplar of this approach, centred as it was on a character “struggling to recognise what sort of future he was in”. Guess what “A Clown Escapes From Circus Town” is about?

There are differences. Beaners the clown struggles not because the world he lives in is so strange (although it is), but because he is raised ignorant, perhaps not really even comprehending that he and the two thousand other clowns he shares a Big Top with are slaves. He knows the world beyond Circus Town only by repute: Medieval Village, Superhero Cove, Monster World, Sextown. He knows how to be funny. He knows that he wants to know where people go, when they disappear.

And so the innocent goes abroad. His incomprehension when confronted with possible explanations of his world, as described by a narrator who knows more than he does, can be quite touching —

It was difficult for Beaners to imagine a mixed town. What were they, if they had no themes? How did the people who lived there think about the place where they lived? And what did they do there? It was like a person with no face.

— if perhaps familiar. His adventures are engaging, particularly when they get strange or serious, or best of all, both. I’ll forgive the disingenuously dramatic ending, lest I become a stuck record, and because a part of me was cheering, this time. Don’t tell anyone.

The Other Links

“Memory Dust” by Gareth L Powell

IZ220 coverStop me if feels like you’ve met this chap before (you haven’t):

“Before that, he’d worked his way across the sky, serving time on freighters and troop transports, slogging all the way from the core to the rim and back again, saving up the money to buy his own ship. Over the years, he’d hauled every sort of cargo. He’d seen the sun rise on a dozen different worlds, had his nose broken in a bar, and married twice. He’d lost his first wife to infidelity, the second — Amber’s mother — to complications during childbirth. There had been nothing permanent in his life. He remembered it as one long series of farewells. Even now, at the end of his career, he was saying goodbye to his only daughter.”

That’s the rather splendidly named Caesar Murphy, space pilot extraordinaire, setting off on his final flight: a record-breaking trip through “the pitiless fires of hyperspace”, driven by a recurring dream to return an alien creature to “the ruins of an ancient citadel, on a dying planet circling a swollen star”. The first half of the story is a brisk-to-the-point-of-abbreviation collection of scenes that introduce Murphy, his situation, his spaceship, and his love, Maya (“an accomplished jumper in her own right”, of course). The second half is more detailed, more interesting, features the titular dust, and culminates in a moment that could almost be a knowing evisceration of what has come before: Murphy, born in two dimensions, utterly unable to cope with the more emotionally ambitious situation he’s ended up in.

But the story doesn’t know what it has, and doesn’t have the weight to make it work. Murphy turns his ship, and “in the harsh light of the dying sun”, with “the throttle wide open”, it leaps “like an arrow into the empty sky”. It needed to cut the sky like scissors.

“Miles to Isengard” by Leah Bobet

IZ220 coverTangent Online: “rumbled on monotonously”. The Fix: “a group of variously broken and somewhat annoying characters stuck on a journey we don’t really understand”. I, of course, quite liked it. It’s true that the cast is a gang of squabblers, and it’s true that one note defines the story. But it’s a good, solid note of paranoid urgency: we ride shotgun as the gang truck their way across a security-throttled near-future North-West US with a stolen nuclear bomb in the back. They fear being caught, though any pursuers never get close enough to be a threat; and the narrator fears the bomb’s whispering words, which may burn a hole in his mind (yes, not unlike a certain Ring) before they can reach their destination and chuck the bomb down the throat of Mount Rainier (so why Isengard in the title, I haven’t worked out). The gang’s interactions are nervous and claustrophobic and nicely observed; when each member falls by the wayside, something does seem to be lost. There’s the occasional dose of Meaning:

“It won’t matter, in the end. Maybe it was just something on impulse we did to make us feel better. Maybe if we really meant it we’d have stayed low, stayed quiet and made change another way instead of blowing all our chances from here on forward to make some difference. To be some good for real, not just … bomb’s a symbol. It’s not the world.”

The ending tries too hard. But the rumbling journey is worth it.

“Spy vs Spy” by Neil Williamson

IZ220 coverAn unremarkable short-short, which means to review it is pretty much to kill it. Well, never mind: paranoid stay-at-home Edinburghian, locked in ACME-propelled rivalry with the man who lives across the street, blames the internet. “These websites – Mybook, Faceplace, all that – they encourage you to lay out all your likes and your dislikes […] Even things you’ve never really thought about before you have to be for or against nowadays”. The toonishness of all this is enough to raise a few wan smiles; the inevitable bite doesn’t draw blood.

Short Story Club: “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”

So, here we are, for the last time this run. Here’s the story. I can’t find much comment on this one — I’m sure we’ll rectify that! — but Lois really liked it:

Steampunk is generally regarded as an alternate genre, usually alternate history. This, I believe, must be an alternate steampunk, one further step removed from the mundane reality with which we are familiar. Strange—wondrous strange—poetic, fantastic, mythic, visionary cosmology.

For those of you who enjoy such things, Valente also made a post about writing sf. (This may be of particular interest to James…)

Anyway. The floor is open; what did you think?

“After Everything Woke Up” by Rudy Rucker

IZ220 coverA trailer for Hylozoic, with all the colour and vim and almost complete lack of plot and character that suggests. You can read a version of it here, which has been tinkered with at the sentence level (or the Interzone version has), and goes on a bit longer than “After Everything Work Up” (stop at “The mortar set up as hard as stone”, which in Interzone is “The mortar set up nice and hard, as strong as stone”), but covers the same ground. Two mouthpieces are on a mission to explain the world to each other (i.e., to us):

“You really think we can teleport a whole house this far?” asked Thuy.

“Sure,” said JayJay. “Working alone, you and I can’t teek much more than a couple of hundred kilograms at a time. But with a dozen of our friends pitching in, for sure we can move our little house here from San Francisco. We’ll build the foundation today, and this evening – alley-oop! – we drop our cozy nest into place. Housewarming party!”

They can discuss such things because the title means what it says: after some sort of singularity or singularity-like event, everything – birds called Kwaawk, streams called Gloob, rocks called Bonk and Clack and Harvey – is conscious, thanks to “emergent intelligences based upon chaotic natural computations as enhanced by the ubiquitous memory storage available via the recently unfurled eighth dimension”. It is all completely daffy, nothing resembling a story (OK, there’s a spat with Gloob), and I am helpless before it.

Consciousness goes all the way down to the atoms in your body, and all the way up to Gaia, but the teleportation is a human thing:

“I don’t think it’s Gaia’s doing,” said JayJay. He’d been one of the first to figure out teleportation, and he liked to hold forth about it. [And everything else!] “The ability to teleport is peculiar to the human mind. Rats and roaches are too carefree to fuzz out and teleport. Over the millennia, we humans have evolved towards thinking ourselves into spots where we’re not. It’s all about remorse, doubt and fear. As for intelligent objects – sure the silps can talk, but they don’t have our rich heritage of hang-ups: our regrets about the past, our unease about the present, our anxiety about the future. Humans are used to spreading themselves across a zillion worlds of downer what-if. That’s why we can teleport.”

Heavy, dude! And did you know that communing with Gaia gets you high? Oh Rudy Rucker, never change.

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster

IZ220 coverA more polished offering, about masks and made of masks, all the way down. How much to unmask here? Let’s say that structure – numbered sections, from one point of view – masks the real story, and trappings – Queen and court, available trades – mask the real setting. Masks themselves define the narrator each day, job and personality and gender. Every aspect of identity. They’re elaborate things, painted dressed-up colours: sable or ebony black, saffron yellow, jasper red, sapphire blue. Fun! Except when your job is to be tortured to death, perhaps.

One by one the masks are stripped away. “Imprint” isn’t the first clue, but may be the moment the story fully reconfigures itself in the mind. It’s a criminal offence to be in a position to hear that meaning of that word, of course, an illicit thrill: learning who’s running this dollhouse and how is forbidden. Suffice to say that there isn’t necessarily salvation in taking off the mask, in the certainty of “I”. That would be too easy. I liked the story for that, and for toying with me. It’s also available online, here.

“Monetized” by Jason Stoddard

IZ220 coverHmm. This strikes me as a rough start, in several senses:

My Saturday started with Antonio Moreno, screaming at me through my eyeset.

“Mike! Where’d the money go!” he yelled.

I groaned. I sat up. Full sun streamed through the grimy windows of my Silver Lake crackerbox, slashing the bedsheets white and hitting one absinthe-soaked retina like a billion photonic bullets.

(We already know he’s screaming. Do we really need that “he yelled”? Either way, shouldn’t that exclamation be a question? And isn’t that “Full sun…” sentence just trying a bit too hard? I quite like “slashing the bedsheets white”, and I don’t mind the basic image behind “like a billion photonic bullets”, but the construction feels off; I start wondering what a photon-like bullet would be like, rather than wincing at the bullet-pain caused by a billion photons.)

We lay our scene in a near-future “de facto post-scarcity” California from the hyperactive Doctorow/Stross mould, with narration by a petulantly plugged-in young man (teenager?), so the story couldn’t really be said to calm down at any point, but it does become engaging enough that I stopped stumbling over the rough patches. Manufacturing is so cheap that most people can achieve a decent standard of living by “monetizing” their everyday interactions; a cross between Google Ad Sense and the Microsoft Paperclip whispers “revenue opportunities” in the narrator’s ear. We are intended to take this seriously, both economically and in its potential to deform human relations. I haven’t thought about it too hard. Some of it is decently chilling: casual mention of “the anonymity of people who suck at social networking”, for instance. Some of it feels glib, as the story barrels towards its paradigm-shifting conclusion. Little of it feels distinctive.