Broken Frontier

We're going to try something else for a change and step slightly outside the boundaries of comics and dive firmly and with a resolute mind into the realms of culture and sci fi. This time out we're going to take a look at the latest issue of Interzone, one of the leading magazines of a dying breed: the sci fi magazine. Interzone publishes all original stories by new, established and up and coming writers.

Interzone #224 starts off with established short story writer Jason Sanford entitled Sublimation Angels. Sanford sketches a beautifull story of self-exploration in a closed society. A society divided in classes, cut off from the universe by aliens whose purpose for this cross section of humanity is unknown. The story rolls along and the protagonist is a likable underdog whose smartness is not enough to move him along on the ice planet. It has a good rythm to it, balancing action with more poetic moments. The title refers to a beautiful visual where oxygen is released through craters that trail off into the stars because the surface of the planet has no atmosphere.

After this space tale with some nice technological inventions comes No longer You by Katherine Sparrow and Rachel Swirsky. A tale of self-discoverment or empowerment, depending on how you look at it. Its poetic prose focuses on two persons and a nice bit of genetic engineering linked to the Kabbalah. It is maybe more fantastical in nature than scientific. It clocks in at just 6 pages and could've have used a few more pages to deepen out the characters. The character of Aviva, the 'soul stalker', devours people and experiences, a sort of genetically bred collector for a specific species (Jews in this case). The otherness of how to live with all these people and experiences inside her is only touched upon and seemed to me more interesting than the plot of our protagonist who needs to decide to let himself be taken or not because his life has not been so great up till now. Which is a rather easy route to take it would seem to me ...

Adrian Joyce is a new talent and this is his first Interzone story published. Shucked is a well written and furious techno horror story which I found pleasantly refreshing in Interzone. An unexplicable creature is let loose in  an office building at night. It is tied into the coffeemachine that is hooked to the internet and seems responsible for transforming the digital letters that Kevin encounters at every turn into every sort of spam imaginable. From there on it only get's worse. The prose is very tight, the future 'next year' and Joyce incorporates a lot of current internet and tech terms in his prose which makes the whole thing a regular rollercoaster flyby. Very good.

After these we are back into more regular territory with Jeremiah Tolbert's The Godfall's Chemsong. A well written aquatic sci fi story of  what seems to be an underlying theme of this issue, self-empowerment and its consequences when you live in a hive. It contains some neat ideas about hive-like creatures in an aquatic world and the consequences for the individual.

The higlight of the issue though would be Chris Butler's The Festival of Tethselem. Two men set out to steal a frozen statue in a mythological city. Unfortunately nobody knows what the statue looks like, what the security is and not even how or why a whole city and religion has risen around it. An enthralling and fascinating ride with well written characters and good and big ideas. Again it plays a bit more with the border between sci fi and fantasy but it is just so well written that it rises above genre classification. 

And there you have it. I would give this issue a very good. Not just because of the quality of the stories - the only one I found to be lacking in character development was No longer You - but because the stories bound together formed a nice look at how diverse  the genre can be. Interzone is filled out with reviews and looks at the latest sci fi books, films and television series. They are, as always, entertaining, very critical and immensely well written.