Interzone #274

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Rating: 3/5

An average issue, with interesting stories by Antony Johnston, Michael Reid and Alexandra Renwick.

• “Beautiful Quiet of the Roaring Freeway” by James Sallis: a couple take a ride in a car with a driver in this future where other cars have a difference

• “Soul Music” by Antony Johnston: on a colony world isolated when their wormhole collapsed, an artist is offered a guitar by her ex-abusive boyfriend. Little does she know the contents of the guitar would become the centrepiece of her next artistic show in the colony that is trying to live day-by-day while waiting for the wormhole to be re-established (if ever).

• “Schrödinger’s” by Julie C. Day: set in California in a future where an unrest is gradually creeping closer to town, a group of girls finances the operations of a scientist who provides them with a quantum device that makes their exotic dance operations a draw: in its field, the audience sees other quantum possibilities of the dancers, some of them very strange. But it all comes to an end when the fighting reaches the city: unless one girl operates the quantum device in another way, hoping to influence the fighting instead.

• “Never the Twain” by Michael Reid: a story of one person living two lives: in the present as a patient dying from cancer and in the future as an inhabitant of a far away colony. Should the two lives be kept separate, especially when the future half has knowledge that could save the present half?

• “Opium for Ezra” by T.R. Napper: a story about a group of people isolated in a self-powered tank on a battlefield. As they pursue their enemy, they receive a strange set of messages aimed at the commander, telling her she’s not a commander of a tank, but actually immersed in a video game. And they desperately want her to leave the game by opening the hatch, which would let the enemy in. Which reality should she believe in?

• “baleen, baleen” by Alexandra Renwick: an interesting fantasy tale of a man who deliberately drowns himself multiple times. In doing so, his non-physical self gains access to whale-like ‘baleen strings’ that he can manipulate to change the past. But doing so would also change his future.

• “Zen” by Eliot Fintushel: aliens take over the minds of the crew of an Earth ship, except for one whose meditations prevent them from doing so. But will her meditations be strong enough to prevent them from invading the Earth?

Magazine read from 2018/03/26 to 2018/04/08