Interzone #283

Main Index / Reviews Index / Magazine Reviews Index / Interzone Reviews Index

Rating: 4/5

A better than average issue, with interesting stories by Fiona Moore, David Cleden and Dustin Blair Steinacker.

• “The Winds and Persecutions of the Sky” by Robert Minto: two people with ambitions to move to the cleanest parts of their skyscraper habitat (the basement) decide to explore upwards instead, leading them to a world with dust, dirt and an entirely new world outside their building.
• “Of the Green Spires” by Lucy Harlow: an alien-like plant ‘invades’ Oxford, producing various fruits as it encircles the buildings. But one day, it withdraws from the city to form its own plant city elsewhere. And the people who come to live in it experience a whole new way of life.
• “Jolene” by Fiona Moore: a story involving a man and his intelligent truck. In this world, cars and trucks are sentient. A ‘car psychologist’ is tasked to bring a man and his truck back together, having separated due to an unknown reason. But as he investigates their background, items like abuse and cults are bought to light. A violent confrontation occurs, but as the dust settles, it is left to the reader to decide whom is the abuser and whom is the abused in their relationship.
• “The Palimpsest Trigger” by David Cleden: alien beings known as Palimps rule over their neighbourhood areas in an unnamed city, bringing death to those who disobey them via deathly triggers on patterns implanted in the victims. One man is tasked with delivering a blow on a neighbouring Palimp competitor, in return for being able to forget how he caused the death of his little sister. But memories and thoughts start to surface that lead him to a startling conclusion about what had actually happened to his sister.
• “Fix That House!” by John Kessel: a short short story about a couple fixing up a house in a historically accurate way; perhaps too accurate.
• “Two Worlds Apart” by Dustin Blair Steinacker: a James White award winning story, it tells an interesting tale of a group of human diplomats who are sent to an unusual isolated world drifting in the void (not orbiting a star) that somehow has a civilization on it. It is the task of the humans to get the aliens on the planet to join the Collective (a group of alien civilizations). But the task appears to flounder due to the way of living of the aliens and a different way of offering them to join would be needed.

Magazine read from 2019/09/22 to 2019/09/27