Uploaded December 16, 1996 -- Updated December 16, 1996
Here is the list of stories in this issue. If you have any comments or reviews, send them to jbailey@sff.net. Please indicate which issue and/or story you're referring to in the subject line, and try to keep comments for different stories separate in you letters so I can place them properly.
"The East" by M. John Harrison
"Egyptian Gum" by Nikki Ducornet
"Life Afterwards" by Christopher Burns
"Planet of Shit" by Nicholas Lezard
"The Canon" by Elizabeth Young
"Alone Alarm" by Jonathan Carroll
"Zips" by Toby Litt
Miscellaneous Comments (on the magazine as a whole, editorials, columns, etc.) [12/16/96]
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Rich Horton: 12/16/96
This is (to my knowledge) the fourth guest-edited Interzone in the last 4 or 5 years (including the Interzone/Aboriginal combined editions (one edited by Charles Ryan), the Interzone/Nexus merger edition (edited by Paul Brazier), an issue last year edited by Charles Platt, and this issue edited by Nicholas Royle. I think this is an excellent concept, and works really well in varying the style and content of the magazine. It's not that the stories are better, but they are different. Royle's tack, signalled by his editorial, seems to be to feature stories on the sf/mainstream boundary. The actual stories in this issue are of varied quality: the best is Harrison's "The East", about a refugee from a mysterious "Eastern" country, seemingly one of the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, but ... ? The SF content is minimal, allowing the author to hint at a theme about refugees in general, and alienation, and being lost. The other stories are mixed: I found Young's "The Canon" next most interesting, about a future in which the literary canon is still further forgotten and debased than it is now, but it doesn't quite gel as a story. The only story I disliked was "Zips", one of those stories which seems to take recourse in the idea that a little senseless violence at the end solves everything.
Rich Horton
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