The convention was one of bookish first editions on trestle tables as well as dealers’ rooms, conference lectures, self-contained readings and a bar. Despite the bar, everyone seemed dowdy and sad, not dressed in colourful clothes, rarely smiling. I’d only dragged myself there, despite my health condition, to maintain friendships in this book world and its fantasies, some of which world migrated into open land around the conference hotel, weather permitting, some attendees flying kites that flopped back to earth, others trying to chat to each other with some alacrity, but failing. Even a few alpha males seemed downtrodden and unsure of themselves. One person conducted a tombola stall with prizes comprising some dog-eared books he or she didn’t want any longer. There was also a rumour of a future mass raffle with similar prizes. The talks were quite interesting, but often confrontational even litigious. The hotel bedrooms with windows that hadn’t been cleaned for 23 years. I bought one book that I later regretted buying, renewed one friendship and started afresh with another. But all done in a half-hearted manner with a half a bitter in my hand. Many people didn’t even know who I was.
But, and this was a big upbeat BUT, the rumour of the raffle was later replaced with that of a disco party in the evening at a purpose-erected marquee just over the brow of the hill from the hotel. I noticed glints in the eyes of those around me at such news, even talk of Pink Floyd providing the music, or maybe it was one of their tribute bands, but some tributes can be better than the original, a bystander told me, a complete stranger wanting to befriend me, instead of the other way about. Things began to appear less pear-shaped as the evening drew closer. Would I go? Would my health permit? Did I have enough fineries to fling on me for a possible fling? And eventually I heard distant music from the dark side of the hill, now lit up, as if in a Close Encounters encounter, and my heart strained at its bit. I saw others traipse off with tiny leapfrogs in their own glory clothes, not a book in sight. Some of the individuals actually seemed sexy, some fresh and dappled in daisies, as if they had only arrived for this disco party. Even I myself did not look bookish at all. This was the fantasy fulfilled.
I plodded bouncily, unescorted, but still living in hope, until I realised that I would never quite reach where others had already reached, the cosmic music, true, gradually louder in my ears, but the distance between myself and the place whence the music was generated seemed to stay relentlessly the same. Was this a dream? The final fantasy of all? Would I wake soon behind a hotel bedroom window? I was only partway there when I realised that each part of a part distanced between parts formed, forever, a part of the next part, while making these parts turn a Party into more of a Paradox than a Paradise.
This magazine is a beautifully handleable 277 page pocket paperback book, with colour illustrations and artwork plus many fiction stories and non-fiction articles.
I hope to review below each fiction item as I read it in real-time…
***
PLAGUE DREAM by Seán Padraic Birnie
“She dreamt without sleeping.”
This is vision of the first lockdown of the recent pandemic with memorable details that still haunt us on and off now crystallised almost as if it were SF that never happened. It is uncannily rehaunting and reheating. It has the enormous pack and power of the Birnie fiction I have grown to love over the years. I first read him before he was ever published, I somehow recall.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/sean-padraic-birnie/
SIGNIFICANT DISRUPTION by R. L. Summerling
“She had the sense that it both was and wasn’t him.”
Since writing yesterday above, INTERZONE has received Best Magazine Award from the British Fantasy Society. And this story is just one example of the many great stories that this title has published since 1982! Although quite short, another work that packs a punch, strangely with more lengthy echoes after reading it. A story of commuting to an office job — perhaps of re-commuting since the lockdowns depicted above — and the paranoiac anxieties and bullying involved, and the wear and tear of train disruption, here aligned with disembodied visions worthy of that state we should call ‘interzone’ and a sense of impending disaster, either deliberate or accidental.
EASELS by Amal Singh
“Actions, decisions, counterpoints, disasters, wonder.”
This imaginatively engaging tale of connections mended and a broken marriage healed by the fine instinctive art of the marriage’s young daughter could easily (even easelly) find a place in a SF magazine such as this one as well as in mainstream or literary ‘glimpses of truth’ as I have reviewed here. I do not mean that lightly.
WE ARE A LITTEL HOTEL by Ai Jiang
Not written by an AI, I infer, but by a constructively fallible luminary of literature excellently suitable for those fiction publications linked in the previous entry above, no mistake! A charming story with, tellingly, a first person plural narrator about a hotel from the point of view of its staff where its guests are mainly relatives of the staff, somehow combining the off beat and the numinous, dare I say also combining the aura of classic Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and, far more humbly if immodestly, my own very recent ‘mansions’ miniatures, but with a certain uniqueness found in neither of those two other inadvertent post-offshoots. The wind got me most.
O SOLE MIO by Katie McIvor
“She had to shuffle Rory into her elbow so she could hold the cone…”
I simply loved this simple, nostalgic but eventually dark story of possible time travel to ‘cone zero’ (google please, with added chocolate flake!), about a mother and her new baby Rory, and her waning marriage, as haunted by an ice cream van in January. I can’t tell you more for fear of spoilers but it should be on everybody’s reading list.
My own earlier divergent reference to the ice cream van syndrome: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/14/ice-cream-van-phobia/
And a photo of an ice cream van I took a few months ago near where I live: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/20/o-sole-mio-by-katie-mcivor/
Cone Zero: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3993599-cone-zero
From the Cone Zero to the…
ANOMALOUS INSTANCES OF BLACK BALL LIGHTNING, MICHIGAN by Stephanie Lane Gage
“…’black static flooding the whites of his eyes.’”
This work deploys a fascinatingly methodical science of case-studies regarding the seemingly Fortean effects head-lined in the above title, leading to a close encounter, closer than most!
GLORY HOUNDS by H. Pueyo
I am afraid I became lost in this story, about an ‘item’ of two men with a pet jaguar and the promises made to each other over the years to defeat certain obstacles in an inscrutable quest, taking place in a South American (?) setting with various mysterious pyramids and much else. I could tell it is well written, and it’s my fault, not the story’s, that I became lost.
From Pitanga the Jaguar above to…
HOLLYWOOD ANIMALS by Corey J. White
“A flung elbow caught him in the eye and he squeezed it shut.”
Well, I think this is a truly remarkable story hidden halfway into this set of fictions as if hidden in plain sight, and it is up to you to find it now I have blown its game. A story that features a believable film director and his daughterly backstory also involving economics and Hollywood unions in interface with our concerns about AI here made into a tangible befriending of CGI creatures as hybrid births from real animals as created for appearing in science fiction films. I squeezed both chitinous elbows shut when simply thinking about it in transit of reading.
COPPER by Jendia Gammon
A nifty, lightsome treatment of supposed AI dangers, as seen through a touching and provocative portrayal of a woman and her robot helper. Certainly hits the spot!
THE FIFTH HORIZON by Nozaki Mado
Translated by Cat Anderson
“In space, there was no distinction between up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards — so where exactly was the goal he continued to race toward.”
Another story hidden in plain sight, that I am blowing the gaff on here. A mighty epic— complete with visual diagrams about grassland and steppe-lands extended into space with new ‘dimensions’ and ‘roots’ the concept of which is breathtaking including ironically a ‘thorny problem’ — regarding the empire building of Genghis Khan into such spatial vastness, and the battles personal and infinite that he fought. It made my problems today seem very small when faced with such visionary power.
Cf the rootball here, the same day: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/21/nocebo-r-ostermeier/#comment-27520
THE LUNAR ASYLUM by Frank Dumas
“…the rocket instantly and silently transformed into a blossom of incandescent gas. / One mile! Five seconds! / She flung herself on the boggy grass…”
Not so much the steampunk sense of mad scientists from the title but more a derring-do Lunar Society of an arguably alternate world 19th century, as various characters, including historical ones we all recognise as real, also plum eating and pit sucking being just one debrief from having gone to the moon and back. Well documented and engagingly described, this returns me to my earlier reading days of equal derring-do and Henri Rousseau type naivety in Verne rocket science with the style this old school SF magazine sporadically gives off and its exciting and sometimes child-like, but never childish, illustrations scattered throughout.
“Drawer at your elbow.”
Cross-referenced a second time here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/09/21/nocebo-r-ostermeier/#comment-27525
SUPERNAUT by Edward R. Morris
“…annotated in pencil by the rocketmen…”
…and by me, as I always do. And this Joycean inner vision from Hugo Gernsback of scientifiction at later stages in his life with both downgrading and upsizing of a Molly monologue self in life’s mirror of Scientifiction, along with other figures of the era, taking us from the ‘hidden in plain sight’ syndrome to the new-tangled showmanship of a TV studio and this will outlast even literature itself, as well as the Great War, Orson Welles, HG Wells, Oppenheimer(?), Breton and the Surrealists, and much else and whoever sees around such corners of words.
“God damn that Lovecraft to Hell…”
My previous review of this author: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/17782-2/#comment-14467
Notes From the Meeting of the First
State FederWorld Court: Walker Dairy, Freeville, Ny,198Year One: Jessica Jane Pearson Vs.The StrangerMr. Jacob Hamptonby Rachael Cupp
Directly from one Morris above to another one here (Grace Elizabeth Morris – aka Violet Elizabeth Bott?), a sort of ‘Just William’ gang role-play and transcription upon court justice and its enactments sited coincidentally within my own recent ‘attics’ syndrome, a ‘story’ that apocalyptically resonates with this author’s
connectedwork in 2017 and 2018 as published in Interzone here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/interzone-273/#comment-11071 and here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/19/interzone-276/#comment-13244BUILDING BLOCKS by Aigner Loren Wilson
“‘No, wait’, Versa said, gripping Drake by his elbow. ‘What I mean is you need to reorient yourself.’”
This is a most engaging rhapsody of a work ethic as potential elbow grease between home and home’s moon where all, whatever their alien breed or proclivity or recognisable human fallibility, need homes built, with smeary artwork and craquelure and tentacular tattoo, and expressive pronoun use, sexuality and self-identity. For more focused details within my own broad-stroked painting of this story’s plot, you simply must read it.
STRUNG ALONG IN SEAFORTH by Jonathan Laidlaw
“Bristling with creativity…”, this is an absurdist work, as this fiction set’s clinching coda, creating itself in competition with its enhancing surround of illustrative artwork by another soul other than its own soul within the constructed mannequinful of words, a grotesque carnival competition, bitterly fought, in a characterful Under Milk Wood seaside place where past corpses of friends and relatives are re-dressed and then re-addressed in person as competition entries, with automata, too, of competition rivals, defeating any AI desirous of replicating any part of this already scraped array. With all the necessary flaying and flensing and recrimination and rapprochement. Giving a final berth to my own creative wandering among unique fictions set among non-fiction and artwork, the latter yet to be read and fully viewed if not re-viewed and then assessed privately.
END