Interzone #266

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Rating: 4/5.

An uneven issue, with mostly fluffy SF pieces. But it gets a higher rating because of two good quality horror-themed stories by Ray Cluley and Malcolm Devlin. Horror isn’t my cup of tea (or coffee) but the writing in those two stories kept me interested in them until the end.

• “The Apologists” by Tade Thompson: in a future where aliens accidentally destroy the world, five humans are all that is left to rebuild with the aliens’ help. But one man wants to recreate the world imperfectly and with violence for that was he had lived and recoils at the daily apologies by the aliens; for he too has much to apologise for.
• “Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion” by Georgina Bruce: a strange tale about an on-going alien message being received and how its interpretation depends on who is receiving it. One interpretation, for example, is as a series of letters from a tentacled alien seeking intercourse with the receiver.
• “Sideways” by Ray Cluley: a chilling, fascinating story. Told from the point of view of a test pilot at the end of his life, it tells the story of his friend, another test pilot, who is charged with piloting an unusual arrow-like plane that can hide from view. But the tale takes a dark and horrifying turn when the fellow pilot reveals what he sees when the plane is hidden from view; a sight that follows him back into our world on his next test flight.
• “Three Love Letters From An Unrepeatable Garden” by Aliya Whiteley: a short-short told as three letters by a gardener hired to take care of a unique flower. A flower so unique that the public is in a near-riot to see it for it has a special gift for those who sniff it.
• “The End Of Hope Street” by Malcolm Devlin: another horror themed light fantasy tale. This one is about the houses of Hope Street, which are unpredictably becoming ‘unliveable’. How the street inhabitants cope with the sudden loss of their houses and with one another runs through the story and at the end, one house is left but by then the notion of livable and unliveable has taken a paranoid twist.

Magazine read from 2016/09/28 to 2016/10/11.