Interzone #280

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Rating: 4/5

A better than average issue with three good stories by Val Nolan, Maria Haskins and Nicholas Kaufmann and an emotional tale by Shauna O’Meara.

• “Cyberstar” by Val Nolan: an interesting story that starts with the narrator’s eyes being gouged out (ewwww), followed by the events that lead up to it and the events following it. He’s now part of a cultish group on an asteroid, whose leader plans to immortalize himself and his followers by becoming a part of ‘god’. But things don’t turn out as planned when the narrator turns out to have altered the immortalization scheme.
• “And You Shall Sing to Me a Deeper Song” by Maria Haskins: a fascinating story about a singer who, when fitted with augmentations, gets the ability to ‘hear’ and to ‘alter’ the behaviour of robots, usually destroying them. The story is set in the aftermath of a war against the robots where the singer has escaped from a detention centre and ended up in a farming community hoping to live their lives away from the central military authority. But when soldiers attack and capture children from the camp, the singer sets out to rescue them, revealing the ability that let her escape in the first place and showing how powerful her singing can be.
• “Coriander for the Hidden” by Nicholas Kaufmann: a nice retelling of some of the events from the Old Testament, from the viewpoint of an angel who looks after the flowers in the Garden of Eden. When this angel gets assigned the task to kill the firstborn of Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus, the angel is initially reluctant to kill innocent children. But then the angel gets an idea on how to save the children while fulfilling his duty to the On-High. It is left as an exercise to the reader to ponder whether the result was the On-High’s plan for him, or whether he actually modified the plan.
• “Everything Rising, Everything Starting Again” by Sarah Brooks: a meandering story set in a time when people are mysteriously transforming into butterflies. People try to go about their lives normally, hoping not to see the signs that their loved ones or themselves are about to change form.
• “‘Scapes Made Diamond” by Shauna O’Meara: an emotional story about two people called back to comfort an alien creature who is dying. The alien has the ability to share thoughts, making it valuable to the company that keeps it locked up. But its ability is harvested brutally by the company. As the dying creature replays their past history, including the instances of forbidden love between them, it gradually reveals the reason why it called them back and what they have to sacrifice to help it protect the future of its species.

Magazine read from 2019/03/21 to 2019/03/31