Interzone #287

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Rating: 4/5

A better than average issue with a long, strange, tale of travel to another world that may yet be ours by Tim Lees, Eugenia Triantafyllou and ending with a tale of a timely intervention by Val Nolan that may yet make America great again in a different way.

• “Night-Town of Mars” by Tim Lees: a strange but interesting tale of a boy who visits his eccentric uncle in the countryside. But what starts out as a simple visit turns dramatic when a plot is revealed by the local town council to take over the uncle’s land. And a way to stop it may involve a dramatic strange trip through a land that looks similar to but set in a very dramatically different kind of world.
• “Those We Serve” by Eugenia Triantafyllou: on a tourist island, robots with memories of their original humans inhabitants serve the tourists while the inhabitants stay sheltered underground. One robot has developed a relationship with a tourist who always visits (and has romantic thoughts from his original). But it may all come crashing down when the inhabitants decided to return to the surface and ‘retire’ the robots.
• “The Transport of Bodies” (a Humboldt Station story) by John Possidente: a reporter waiting for a relative bumps into a traveller with a tale of encountering a strange object far out in space. But the story barely scratches the surface of the puzzling object before it ends.
• “Make America Great Again” by Val Nolan: a journalist goes back to the scene of a demonstration that turned violent one year after it happened. But what he’s interested in is something strange that occured during the demonstration: a man who saves a girl from been shot. But the man is apparently from the past. Amidst rumours of UFOs and visitors from the past, he interviews the people involved and writes a story about bravery, the fight against violence and the possibility that America can truly overcome its violent tendencies and become great again.

Magazine read from 2020/06/06 to 2020/06/20