“Saving Diego” by Matthew Kressel

IZ221 cover There is a trick to writing first-person narratives set in the future, of course. I’m not asking for Nadsat every time, but I think that either you have to make some attempt to make your narrator sound like they belong — as Jason Stoddard attempts in “Monetized” — or you have to make something of the dissonance, say as Ian R MacLeod does in Song of Time. The big problem with “Saving Diego” is that it doesn’t really do either. Here’s the first paragraph:

I had traveled twelve thousand, seven hundred and sixty light-years to see my friend, but the hardest part of the trip was the last seventy one flights of stairs. Goddamn the Nefanesh and their ass-backwards ways! I struggled to catch my breath as I moved down a dim hallway covered with dust. Oil lamps flickered from high places, and the doors sported knobs and hinges, like some virt park for kiddies, a rehash of a dead era. But no, the Nefanesh preferred their realtime antique, the fucks. Why Diego had come all the way out here, to this world at the edge of the galaxy where the planet-munching numens roam, I could only guess. I hadn’t seen my friend in six years.

The first sentence has a nice jaded-by-wonder vibe to it; the second is pure contemporary American, yet the casual space travel to a human colony thousands of light-years from Earth (and the mention of “virt parks”, and the idea that doorknobs are an antique affectation) makes it clear we are some way into the future. “Goddamn”, “the fucks”, and “ass-backwards” — that last in particular, I think — are jarring.

That said, when we meet Diego, the language makes more sense. Here he is: “smiling like the Buddha. He wore nothing but a pair of ripped shorts … A mop of greasy gray hair hung to his shoulders and his beard was long and shaggy.” This is a drug story. Diego is addicted to the local stuff, jisthmus, which really truly gives you access to higher consciousnesses (the aforementioned planet-munching numens), and he’s called Mikal to help him get clean. So there’s some hippy in the mix (and not shiny happy Rucker people, either), which explains much of Mikal’s voice (if you can choose to believe, for the duration of a story, that people like him will always talk like that), and there’s some “gritty” addiction stuff, and a bunch of sfnal literalising, as when Mikal takes his own inevitable trip, and feels “… a monstrous hand reaching across light-years of space to stroke me … Pleasurable like a thousand orgasms. And vile, because each stroke said to me I was nothing but a speck of flotsam in an infinite sea.” All of which is fine as far as it goes; but Kressel wants his future to feel slightly plausible, too, so we get other slang — oxdep, realtime, freegenes — and the two idioms don’t mesh, neither deepening nor informing the other. “Saving Diego” is stranded by its style.

“Fishermen” by Al Robertson

IZ221 cover And then there are the stories which seem as though they should strike some chord, but don’t, and instead just lie there, inert, unwilling to co-operate. This is one such. The narrator — Interzone does seem fonder of the first person than any other sf short fiction venue I can think of — is an artist in an alternate (?) Renaissance-ish (?) Europe. He is captured by pirates, taken to their home base, and ends up painting their church:

I showed the storm that blew up. I scraped lines in the wall, jagged and terrible, creating a violence that could not be withstood. I showed the fishermen afraid in their little boat, men who knew the sea too well to pretend that they could be saved.

So there is Stuff about Art, and Stuff about Religion, and Stuff about Story, and the lightest breath of the fantastic, and Robertson even finds room for some Stuff about his narrator (fear not!). It’s on the self-concious side (I don’t really believe for a second that the voice is authentic, in the sense of really being how this sort of person would narrate this situation), but I’ve enjoyed my share of this sort of thing; just not this share of it, it seems.

“A Clown Escapes From Circus Town” by Will McIntosh

IZ221 cover Once 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.

“Memory Dust” by Gareth L Powell

IZ220 cover Stop 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 cover Tangent 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 cover An 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?

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

So, the last story (for now) — “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew“, by Catherynne M Valente. Be back here on Sunday for the last discussion.

“After Everything Woke Up” by Rudy Rucker

IZ220 cover A 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 cover A 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.