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Interzone # 216 - June 2008
01/07/2008 . Source: Eamonn Murphy 
bi-monthly magazine: UK publisher/editor address: Andy Cox, TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB6 2LB. Price: £ 3.75 (UK) $ 7.00(US). ISSN: 0264-3596. Buy Interzone in the USA - or Buy Interzone in the UK  check out website: www.ttapress.com
This is a special issue of 'Interzone' dedicated to Mundane SF, which is SF without the really unlikely stuff such as time travel and faster-than-light drive. In the introduction, Geoff Ryman says, 'There is no story without vivid, conflicted, interesting characters who are in a tight spot.' In the rest of the introduction he seems to think that this is what he is presenting here.
He is mostly wrong.
'How To Make Paper Airplanes' by Lavie Tidhar is about some people on a remote desert island not doing very much. The characters seem wistful and sad. At times, it lapses into some incomprehensible dialect. The notes about the author at the end are also written in this incomprehensible dialect but that's fine. I didn't want to know anything about her anyway. Or him, if Lavie is a him.
'Endra - From Memory' is by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who has written good stuff in the past. This story is about a man in a port and a charismatic lady captain who arrives there from a faraway land. She is searching for an island that is supposed to be a sort of paradise. He thinks its only a legend. She sails away and comes back. Then she sails away and doesn't come back. He is wistful and sad. That's it.
'The Hour Is Getting Late' by Billie Aul is about an artist who does great things with virtual technology and the critic who is his ex-wife. The artist and the fans want them to get back together. He is so powerful that she fears she might end up back on the scrap heap if she crosses him, along with poor people who are currently rioting somewhere. This was a good story about a difficult relationship but also about celebrity's obsessed with their own lives, ignoring the real world. The characters were neither wistful nor sad and the science, interactive technology, was integral to the story.
'Remote Control' by R.R. Angell was about the U.S. border with Mexico. In the future, game players can log on and operate sniper rifles to shoot any wetbacks trying to cross. This is a popular pastime and actually brings in revenue for the government. The protagonist was a security guard monitoring the border. He was not sad and SF was not merely the background to this story. The idea was at the core of it. SF is about ideas. It might be about traditional values in a futuristic setting or it might be about startling new values in a futuristic setting but its not about being sad, lonely and wistful in a future setting that's secondary to the emotional content of the story.
'The Invisibles' by Elizabeth Vonarburg was so sad and wistful that I couldn't finish it.
'Into The Night' by Anil Menon was a sad, wistful tale about an old Hindu moving in with his daughter for his last years. The young people and how they lived and society was all odd to him but so were the sixties to earlier generations. This was a mainstream story really, with an SF setting. It wasn't too bad, though.
The last fiction in this issue is 'Talk Is Cheap' by Geoff Ryman, who obviously knows the ingredients of a good story. He told us about them in his introduction. Geoff's notion of a tight spot, it seems, is being a bit lonely. However, the characters were interesting if not exactly vivid and conflicted, so it was all right.
The reviews of films and books were positive, unusual for 'Interzone', and the interview with Greg Egan was quite interesting. But with seven stories of which only two were any good this issue was...well, mundane.
Eamonn Murphy
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