Interzone #262 (Jan-Feb 2016)

By TTA Press

Issue 262 of Interzone contains the latest Wergen story by Mercurio D. Rivera, plus other stories by Rahul Kanakia, Ian Sales, Carole Johnstone, T.R. Napper, and Philip A. Suggars. The cover art is 'The Orion Crusades' by Vincent Sammy, and interior colour illustrations are by Jim Burns and Richard Wagner. Features: The Imitation Game by Vincent Sammy (the cover artist talks about his inspirations and intentions for the 2016 covers); Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe (film reviews, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens); Laser Fodder by Tony Lee (DVD/Blu-ray reviews); Book Zone (book reviews, including Dave Hutchinson interviewed by Andy Hedgecock, plus a round up of our reviewers' favourite books of 2015); Jonathan McCalmont's Future Interrupted (comment); Nina Allan's Time Pieces (comment).

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310758881

TTA Press

TTA Press is the publisher of the magazines Interzone (science fiction/fantasy) and Black Static (horror/dark fantasy), the Crimewave anthology series, TTA Novellas, plus the occasional story collection and novel.

Book preview

Jonathan McCalmont’s Future Interrupted

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Jumping, leaping from Past to Future

Britain is a nation that struggles to see beyond its own kitchen table. Visit any museum devoted to World War II and you will be confronted by a 1940s kitchen complete with ration books and a piped-in approximation of the BBC light programme. In National Trust properties and stately homes, the same pathetic lunge for domestic relatability lands us in the Victorian era where plastic chickens sit atop polished silverware. Aside from being an indictment of museum curatorship, these kitchens signal the limits of our collective imagination: We struggle to imagine either a past or a future that does not resemble the present.

Our perception of time is like a blade of sunlight drawn across the surface of an oceanic darkness… Constrained by human imagination, we approach both future and past with an assumption of universality. We would rather inhabit Charles Stross’ dreams of corporate finance or Kim Stanley Robinson’s terraforming projects than imagine a society freed from the shackles of the market. Rather than understanding seventh century saints and renaissance commissars, we wait for Hilary Mantel and Nicola Griffith to transform them into ambitious civil servants. Good Morrow my liege, what’s the story in Bala-fucking-mory?

This idea that we are estranged from past and future alike serves as unifying theme to one of the great foundational works of British science fiction: Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass.

First introduced in 1953, Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group differed from most period genre protagonists by virtue of being forever at a loss to explain the chaos he uncovered. When a journey into outer space causes an astronaut to change into a murderous plant in The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass mumbles a half-baked theory about disembodied consciousness before abandoning all scientific pretence and calling on the creature to destroy itself. Born of Kneale’s refusal to engage in either detailed world-building or sustained scientific speculation, Quatermass is a transformative figure who does not so much explain the world as provoke it into terrified bafflement.

Quatermass’ role as intermediary between comforting present and disturbing future is particularly evident in the cinematic remakes of his first two outings. While TV encouraged British actors to portray Quatermass as a sensitive boffin, Hammer Films cast an American actor who stripped the character of public school amiability. Reborn as a bull-necked Tony Soprano, Hammer’s Quatermass yells at policemen, bullies underlings and struggles to impose the future on a reluctant Britain regardless of the consequences. His fedora may recall Jimmy Cagney but his presence at the head of a British government agency invites us to imagine him as an American Wernher von Braun, a tyrannical futurist deemed too violent and unpleasant even for the CIA.

Quatermass II is a more unsettling work than The Quatermass Experiment in that the source of the alien presence remains defiantly ambiguous. Having been denied funding to build a Moon base, Quatermass ventures into the countryside and discovers a working Moon colony based on his exact plans. Puzzled by this rival project as well as their robotic guards, Quatermass investigates what turns out to be a futuristic manufacturing plant with access to both orbital mining platforms and implants allowing the management to exert direct control over their workforce. With little in the way of evidence supporting his theory, Quatermass concludes that the factory is an alien terraforming initiative operated by creatures from the rings of Saturn. His decision to destroy both plant and asteroid must be understood in terms of the chaos unleashed in the first series: Once devoted to constructing the future, a chastened Quatermass is horrified when confronted with a glimpse of Britain as a highly-automated society where corporations remake the world and governments foot the bill.

Made by Thames Television in 1979, the fourth Quatermass (aka The Quatermass Conclusion) positions its themes of temporal estrangement squarely in the narrative foreground. Now retired, Quatermass returns to London and discovers that society has torn itself apart. Though remnants of British institutions may skulk in burned-out buildings, the ‘youth of today’ have abandoned making sense of the world and joined a series of murderous political gangs and apocalyptic cults. Desperate to reconnect with his long-lost granddaughter and sympathetic to the cultists’ sense of bafflement, Quatermass is torn between the urge to embrace change and the feelings of resentful nostalgia emanating from a young astronomer. In a scene that foreshadows the magnificent temporal dislocation of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, Quatermass visits the astronomer’s home only to find radio telescopes operating out of Regency observatories as though past and future had converged on a present incapable of relating to either.

In a reversal of the move made in Quatermass and the Pit, The Quatermass Conclusion embeds the future in groups and places more readily associated with the past. Dismissed as reactionary hippies, the young cultists have somehow attuned themselves to a force guiding them to ancient stone circles where they are consumed by unidentified energy fields. Scientists and government officials leap to the conclusion that these children are being destroyed by some alien force but the young remain convinced that they are being transported to another world. Baffled and desperate to act, Quatermass joins with an army of pensioners who lure the futuristic presence into a trap and detonate the world’s remaining nuclear weapons in a gesture that either saves humanity or destroys it once and for all. As in earlier series, Kneale refuses to confirm or deny either side’s version of the facts and so suggests that humanity would rather destroy itself than deal with the ambiguities of change.

Kneale’s earlier masterpiece echoes the work of H.P. Lovecraft by dissolving the imminent future into an impossibly ancient past. Produced between Quatermass II and The Quatermass Conclusion, Quatermass and the Pit is set in Knightsbridge where a wave of post-war gentrification has seen working-class homes bulldozed to make way for fashionable office blocks. The distant past erupts in the form of an ancient humanoid skull forcing contemporary building-work to make way for an archaeological investigation of the past. However, this historical study loops round to the future when diggers uncover a spacecraft that is both ancient and acutely futuristic. Quatermass’ investigation of the craft soon turns into an exploration of human potential as it transpires that the crew of the rocket ship might have been responsibly not only for humanity attaining consciousness but also for our darkest impulses.

Growing ever weirder as it goes, the series touches on German rocketry, Moon bases and missions to Mars before plunging into a mire of ghosts, demons and psychic powers. The climactic scene comes when some 1950s wiring snaps, electrifying the hull of the ancient craft. Transformed into a psychic amplifier with unchecked access to the national grid, the ship unleashes the raw cognitive potential of every Londoner by projecting them into the minds of a far more advanced species. Given a glimpse of their own futures and driven mad by their own innate tendencies towards racism, selfishness and paranoia, the inhabitants of London tear the city to pieces in what must be seen as a preamble to the apocalyptic chaos of the final series.

Quatermass and the Pit rails against the limits of the human imagination. Kneale likens contemporary humans not only to medieval peasants and self-destructive insects, but also Cold War military bureaucrats who survey the infinite possibilities of outer space only to see an opportunity to preserve the current balance of power. Arguably little more than a manifestation of Quatermass’ own darkest impulses, the figure of Colonel Breen reminds us of how easy it can be to wage war against the future.

NINA ALLAN’S TIME PIECES

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Woolf in Winter

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

— Ursula Le Guin, National Book Awards speech 2014

There is a scene in Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours in which we see Virgina Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) struggling with the beginning of what will ultimately become her next novel, Mrs Dalloway. Unable to find a way into the material, she has become mired in exhaustive depression. Then suddenly, a breakthrough. We see the light – the delight – in her eyes as she exclaims to her husband: "Leonard, I think I’ve got it – the first sentence!"

Is writing really that hard, though? Should it be? There are many who will argue that it was all very well for Woolf to make such a meal of her artistic temperament – with private means of financial support and a close-knit group of friends and family to fall back on, she could afford to be a tortured artist. Those without such resources just have to get on with it, or give up the whole idea of being a writer in the first place. Shit or get off the pot. Writing is the sustained practice of putting one word in front of another and if you can’t do that in a workmanlike manner then you clearly aren’t going to cut it as a professional.

Which brings us to the question of what exactly is a professional writer? The number of writers able to support themselves financially through their writing alone is vanishingly small – many will teach, take on technical or advertising copy work, find a totally unrelated and often physically or intellectually draining day job. This is not the writer’s fault. We happen to live in a society that does not value creative work – unless it can be packaged or marketed as something else. Tell your parents or your partner you’ve just landed a copywriting job with a big London ad agency and watch the smiles spread across relieved faces. Now try substituting that happy news with the announcement that you’ve chucked in your Law degree in order to write a novel and just… Yeah. We are taught from a young age that making art for its own sake – and increasingly education, learning for its own sake – is a worthless folly, an indulgence, a statement of irresponsibility. Once again, this is not the fault of our parents and teachers. They are worried for us, because they’ve been there. Their aim (most of the time, hopefully) is to help us to survive. Nonetheless, many artists are made to feel guilty for what they do. They are made to feel, by and large, that they are wasters, that society would value them more highly if they were really, really good at selling toilet rolls. What has been done to our education system by successive governments – both Tory and New Labour – in the three decades since I entered university as an undergraduate has conspired to rob our political culture of any values that do not involve the profit motive. Wilful philistinism has always been prized in this country, but it has increasingly become our mission statement.

I read an interview with a new writer the other day in which they mentioned the challenges they faced as a debut novelist. Writing to deadlines was one of them. I spent more than three years writing the first book, they said. I’m now due to deliver the second in less than a year. The publisher of this debut author has made a great deal of noise – as well they should – about how unique their book is, now complex, how original in concept, how stunningly executed. And yet they are still prepared to issue their brand new Wunderkind with a twelve-month deadline. Do they honestly not see any correlation between the time taken to produce something, and the ultimate quality of the thing produced? Seriously, it baffles me. And yet this is something we are seeing more and more. Authors, like copywriters, are ‘acquired’ as a kind of pig iron, raw ore that can be smelted down and shaped to the corporate design. And never mind the unique qualities of the rock itself.

This is not true for all publishers, of course, and for some writers the ‘book a year’ formula works as a positive creative stimulus and everyone is happy. But all writers are not the same, and however much some might like to argue that a pro is a pro, a journeyman artisan who should be able to turn their hand to anything and at short notice, what Virginia Woolf – or Helen DeWitt – is doing and what Dan Brown is doing are not the same thing. They really aren’t. I am most assuredly not trying to argue that what a Woolf-type writer does is somehow morally ‘better’ than what a Brown-type writer does – I remain convinced that popular bestsellers are bestsellers because the writer has a genuine passion for what they do, that it is precisely passion which makes the book compelling for the reader – just that they are different, and that in order to get the best from a writer, the publisher must be aware of that, and value it, not least – ha! – because it makes good business sense. The Brown books may sell by the lorryload and give an instant reading high but they have a short individual shelf life. It is the Woolf books, with their slow-burn yet cumulative accretion of reader commitment and their lasting contribution to our literary culture, that keep publishers afloat over the long term, gathering plaudits and critical attention and media rights and royalties not just for that first twelve months but for many decades.

By the time this column is published I should, all being well, be on the point of delivering my second novel to my publisher. The Rift has taken me eighteen months to write, including the late summer and autumn of 2014 in which I wrote 60,000 words that were eventually discarded, not because they weren’t good words, but because I realised I’d been coming at the novel from the wrong direction. I needed to ditch what I’d done and start again. Binning words has never bothered me, mainly because I know that the time taken to write them is never wasted. In the case of the 60,000 binned words from my aborted draft of The Rift, a good quarter were perfectly fit for purpose once I’d redrafted them. 10,000 others turned out to have nothing to do with The Rift at all – and yet I loved the narrator of this section so much I later found a way to make him the hero of his own story, a story I should hopefully be redrafting as we speak.

Writing a book consists in more – so much more – than the typing out of a narrative. The physical act of putting the words that make up The Rift on to my hard drive may have taken eighteen months, but the book has been around in my mind far longer than that, and the evolution of its final form has been relatively recent. There is a weird process at work, a symbiosis between intellect and instinct. Writing is not just the physical act of doing it – the written word is merely the physical proof, if proof be needed, of the act of imagining.

Even a writer who writes every day needs time to reboot. I already know what my next novel will be about – I have a whole file of notes on it – but the idea of starting in on it straight away feels completely wrong. I want to think about it first, write some short stories, create a space to give the material time to grow.

For those authors confronted with the kind of industry pressure to produce that now exists, it is absolutely vital that you find out what species of writer you are, that you don’t allow your anxiety around the business of publication – because that’s the one thing we all have – deny you what you need to fulfil that vision. If you happen to be a Woolf, don’t let them shame you and for God’s sake don’t let them hurry you. Take your time and get it right. They’ll still buy it. In the end they’ll probably buy more of it. Never settle for being the writer that everyone seems so eager to turn you into.

DAVID LANGFORD’S ANSIBLE LINK

We Are Everywhere. From a restaurant review: ‘A helping of kale lay over the chicken like a drunken triffid.’ (Independent)

Philip K. Dick