Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Interzone, 2004
Interzone continued to struggle in 2004, but by the end of the year there was some hope for future stability. David Pringle, who has been editor or co-editor of the magazine from the beginning, decided he could no longer keep on, and he sold the magazine to Andy Cox, editor and publisher of The Third Alternative among other magazines. Pringle's last issue was date Spring 2004, while Cox, who is planning to maintain a bimonthly schedule, published two issues: September-October and November-December.
In 2004 Interzone published a total of 15 stories, 7 of them novelettes, for a total of some 108,000 words of fiction. I caution as ever that Interzone, in both incarnations, is not easy to do word counts on, and that a few stories were in the 7000-8000 word range according to my estimates: thus I may have some novelettes listed as short stories or vice versa. (The novelettes averaged about 9800 words, the short stories just about 5000 words.)
I sense that Andy is still getting his feet on the ground regarding "his" Interzone. Many people, myself included, felt that the first issue was a bit of a mess in terms of presentation: much of the interior design made the stories difficult to read. The second issue is a huge improvement in that regard. Others complained about the covers. I liked both covers for looks, but I tend to worry that, as some have suggested, they may not work quite as well in terms of "selling" the magazine. But here I think I need to defer to the guy with his money on the line. As for the fiction, I'd say the jury is still out. My only hope is that some of the Interzone regulars from the Pringle era, many of whom didn't seem to show up very often elsewhere, won't be forgotten. (I refer to the likes of Dominic Green (see below!), Tony Ballantyne, Molly Brown and Eric Brown (unrelated, I'm sure), and more.) The appearance of a good Nicholas Waller story in the most recent issue is a good sign.
My favorite Interzone story from last year was by Dominic Green, and he wins again this year. "Three Lions on the Armband" (Spring) is indeed set in the same future as my choice from last year, "The Rule of Terror": a chaotic future in which a character can complain "I'll never get nuked!" and in which the government decrees there is no God. This novelette concerns a journalist investigating a sort of cult planning to take a spaceship to Venus. It's wild stuff, clever and cynical.
I also liked Alastair Reynolds's "Everlasting" (Spring), a short story (though close to the border) riffing on the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum physics, thus calling to mind Niven's "All the Myriad Ways", Wilson's "Divided by Infinity", and even a recent Interzone story, Egan's "Singleton". From the two Andy Cox-edited issues I liked Antony Mann's "Air Cube" (September-October), a very light (pun intended) story about a company selling cubes of air; Karen D. Fishler's "Someone Else" (September-October), about a prostitute who has a hard time trusting a possible true relationship with a man -- then finds that he has consoled himself with someone else -- someone quite unexpected; and Nicholas Waller's "Enta Geweorc", a dark novelette of a future Earth devastated by war and by the revolt of AIs, and the journey of a war criminal (he may have started the war) from space back to his English home.
