Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (2 page)

As Others See Us II.
A little love in
the
Firefly
reunion TV special: ‘And for the fans – the
greatest moment is this brief snippet where Gina Torres says,
“There’s nothing like a scifi fan. Like warm honey, poured all over
you.” I want to watch that clip over and over.’ (io9) Depends which
fan gets poured.

Malcolm Edwards
, a founding
Interzone
editor, is in
The Bookseller
’s list of ‘100
most influential people in the book industry’. They call him ‘The
brainy fixer behind the scenes at Orion since 1998’.

Publishers & Sinners.
Fictionwise.com, the early e-publishing venture that was pretty
good until bought up by Barnes & Noble, closed in December.
After so many years I’ll miss all those Fictionwise royalty
payments of exciting sums like $1.84. •
Analog
and
Asimov’s SF
increased their short-fiction payment rates from
6–8 cents per word to 7–9 cents per word.

Paul Krugman
, introducing a Folio
Society edition of the Foundation trilogy, has a Margaret Atwood
Moment: ‘Maybe the first thing to say about “Foundation” is that
it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it’s set in the
future, there’s interstellar travel, people shoot each other with
blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial
details, playing a fairly minor part in the story.’

Algis Budrys
has a new
nonfiction book
out
: a little project in which I took part. See
http://ae.ansible.co.uk.

Thog’s Masterclass.
Sharing Dept.
‘Leaks were something Emma didn’t want to share.’ (Elizabeth
Lowell,
Death Echo
, 2010) • Dept of Girly Superlatives.
‘“Good girl,” said Dex, patting her satiny bare shoulder as he
stood free again. “You’re a sport and a gentleman. You don’t
understand the terms? They’re earth words, Greca, that carry the
highest praise a man can give a woman.”’ (Paul Ernst, ‘The Red Hell
of Jupiter’,
Astounding
, October 1931) • Spung in a Cold
Climate Dept. ‘His nipples were standing so erect they looked like
little pink pencil erasers.’ ‘I looked down and noticed my own
chest made it look like I was trying to smuggle candy corn out of
the country, two at a time.’ (Nancy A. Collins,
Right Hand
Magic
, 2010) • Dept of Pet Names. ‘When he got there, his
Deputy, a portly bald man with a ginger moustache called Bo
Sampson, was trying to calm down a hysterical man.’ (Adam Millard,
Dead West
, 2011

* * * * *

R.I.P
.

Janet Berliner-Gluckman
(1939–2012),
South African-born horror/dark fantasy author and anthologist who
won a Stoker award for ‘Children of the Dusk’ (1997) with George
Guthridge, died on 24 October; she was 73.

John Coates
(1927–2012), UK
film-maker and TV executive best known for
Yellow Submarine
(1968) and
The Snowman
(1982, based on Raymond Briggs’
book), died on 16 September aged 84.

Charles E. Fritch
(1927–2012) US
author and editor whose stories are collected in
Crazy Mixed-Up
Planet
(1969) and
Horses’ Asteroid
(1970) died on 11
October; he was 85. One story, ‘The Misfortune Cookie’, was adapted
for
The Twilight Zone
.

Jacques Goimard
(1934–2012), French
critic, editor, novelist and anthologist, died on 25 October aged
78. As acquiring editor at the Paris-based Pocket paperback
imprint, he published some 800 works of sf/fantasy.

David Grove
(1940–2012), US
illustrator inducted into the Illustration Hall of Fame in 2007,
died on 25 October aged 72. Genre work included the striking
Something Wicked This Way Comes
film poster, the
Eye of
the World
ebook, and covers and interiors for Gene Wolfe
titles.

Larry Hagman
(1931–2012), US actor
best remembered as J.R. in
Dallas
and the harried
Captain/Major Anthony Nelson in the fantasy sitcom
I Dream of
Jeannie
(1965–1970), died on 23 November; he was 81.

Alan Hunter
(1923–2012), UK artist
whose work included covers for
Nebula SF
in 1952–1953 and
much interior art for
Nebula
and
New Worlds
through
the 1950s, died on 31 August aged 89. He was unfailingly generous
with artwork for semiprozines and fanzines including
Algol/Starship
,
Ansible
,
Banana Wings
,
Ghosts and Scholars
,
SF Chronicle
,
SFinx
,
Vector
,
Whispers
and many more.

Julie Ann Jardine
(1926–2012), sf
author and fan who with her then husband Jack Jardine wrote
The
Sword of Lankor
(1966) and
The Mind Monsters
(1966) as
by Howard L. Cory, died in November; she was 86.

Kenneth Kendall
(1924–2012), BBC
radio announcer and newsreader (the first to appear on BBC
television) who featured as a newsreader in
Doctor Who:
‘The
War Machines’ (1966) and
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), died
in November aged 88.

Paul Kurtz
(1925–2012),
humanist/sceptical author and founder of Prometheus Books in 1969,
died on 20 October aged 86. Prometheus published many genre works
(including Martin Gardner’s
No-Sided Professor
) before
launching its dedicated sf/fantasy imprint Pyr in 2005.

Patrick Moore
(1923–2012), UK
astronomer, author and TV personality who had presented the BBC’s
The Sky at Night
since April 1957, died on 9 December; he
was 89. His over 20 novels for young readers were all sf;
nonfiction works of genre interest include his sf survey
Science
and Fiction
(1957), the spoof
How Britain Won the Space
Race
(1972 with Desmond Leslie), and the round-up of oddball
science
Can You Speak Venusian?
(1972). He made a cameo
appearance as himself in the
Doctor Who
episode ‘The
Eleventh Hour’ (2010).

Patrick O’Connor
, former
editor-in-chief or senior editor for several US publishers
including Pinnacle and Popular Library, died on 13 October aged 87.
His authors included Ayn Rand and Andrew M. Greeley.

Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.
(1950–2012), US
author of several entertaining sf novels including
Mayflies
(1979),
ORA:CLE
(1984) and the
Journeys of McGill
Feighan
tetralogy, died on 7 November; he was 61.

Spain Rodriguez
(Manuel Rodriguez,
1940–2012), US underground cartoonist who created the
post-holocaust superhero Trashman, died on 28 November; he was
72.

John D. Squires
(1948–2012), US book
dealer,
New York Review of SF
contributor and world
authority on M.P. Shiel, died on 2 November; he was 64.

Boris Strugatski
(1933–2012), Russian
author whose collaborations with his brother Arkady (1925–1991)
were among their country’s finest and most-translated genre sf,
died on 19 November. Their best-known single work may be the story
translated as
Roadside Picnic
(1972) and adapted as Andrei
Tarkovsky’s
Stalker
(1979). Both were popular guests of
honour at the 1987 UK Worldcon in Brighton.

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013 David Langford

* * * * *

by Lavie Tidhar

Illustrations for
The Book Seller
by
Warwick Fraser-Coombe

THE BOOK SELLER

Achimwene loved Central Station. He loved
the adaptoplant neighbourhoods sprouting over the old stone and
concrete buildings, the budding of new apartments and the gradual
fading and shearing of old ones, dried windows and walls flaking
and falling down in the wind.

Achimwene loved the calls of the
alte-zachen, the rag-and-bone men, in their traditional passage
across the narrow streets, collecting junk to carry to their
immense junkyard-cum-temple on the hill in Jaffa to the south. He
loved the smell of sheesha pipes on the morning wind, and the smell
of bitter coffee, loved the smell of fresh horse manure left behind
by the alte-zachen’s patient, plodding horses.

Nothing pleased Achimwene Haile Selassi
Jones as much as the sight of the sun rising behind Central
Station, the light slowly diffusing beyond and over the immense,
hour-glass shape of the space port. Or almost nothing. For he had
one overriding passion, at the time that we pick up this thread, a
passion which to him was both a job and a mission.

Early morning light suffused Central Station
and the old cobbled streets. It highlighted exhausted prostitutes
and street-sweeping machines, the bobbing floating lanterns that,
with dawn coming, were slowly drifting away, to be stored until
nightfall. On the rooftops solar panels unfurled themselves,
welcoming the sun. The air was still cool at this time. Soon it
would be hot, the sun beating down, the aircon units turning on
with a roar of cold air in shops and restaurants and crowded
apartments all over the old neighbourhood.

“
Ibrahim,” Achimwene said,
acknowledging the alte-zachen man as he approached. Ibrahim was
perched on top of his cart, the boy Ismail by his side. The cart
was pulled by a solitary horse, an old grey being who blinked at
Achimwene patiently. The cart was already filled, with adaptoplant
furniture, scrap plastic and metal, boxes of discarded house wares
and, lying carelessly on its side, a discarded stone bust of Albert
Einstein.

“
Achimwene,” Ibrahim said,
smiling. “How is the weather?”

“
Fair to middling,”
Achimwene said, and they both laughed, comfortable in the
near-daily ritual.

This is Achimwene: he was not the most
imposing of people, did not draw the eye in a crowd. He was slight
of frame, and somewhat stooped, and wore old-fashioned glasses to
correct a minor fault of vision. His hair was once thickly curled
but not much of it was left now, and he was mostly, sad to say,
bald. He had a soft mouth and patient, trusting eyes, with fine
lines of disappointment at their corners. His name meant ‘brother’
in Chichewa, a language dominant in Malawi, though he was of the
Joneses of Central Station, and the brother of Miriam Jones, of
Mama Jones’ Shebeen on Neve Sha’anan Street. Every morning he rose
early, bathed hurriedly, and went out into the streets in time to
catch the rising sun and the alte-zachen man. Now he rubbed his
hands together, as if cold, and said, in his soft, quiet voice, “Do
you have anything for me today, Ibrahim?”

Ibrahim ran his hand over his own bald pate
and smiled. Sometimes the answer was a simple “No.” Sometimes it
came with a hesitant “Perhaps…”

Today it was a “Yes,” and Achimwene raised
his eyes, to him or to the heavens, and said, “Show me?”

“
Ismail,” Ibrahim said, and
the boy, who sat beside him wordless until then, climbed down from
the cart with a quick, confident grin and went to the back of the
cart. “It’s heavy!” he complained. Achimwene hurried to his side
and helped him bring down a heavy box.

He looked at it.

“
Open it,” Ibrahim said.
“Are these any good to you?”

Achimwene knelt by the side of the box. His
fingers reached for it, traced an opening. Slowly, he pulled the
flaps of the box apart. Savouring the moment that light would fall
down on the box’s contents, and the smell of those precious,
fragile things inside would rise, released, into the air, and
tickle his nose. There was no other smell like it in the world, the
smell of old and weathered paper.

The box opened. He looked inside.

Books. Not the endless scrolls of text and
images, moving and static, nor full-immersion narratives he
understood other people to experience, in what he called, in his
obsolete tongue, the networks, and others called, simply, the
Conversation. Not those, to which he, anyway, had no access. Nor
were they books as decorations, physical objects hand-crafted by
artisans, vellum-bound, gold-tooled, typeset by hand and sold at a
premium.

No.

He looked at the things in the box, these
fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled
of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and
tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things which had
lived
.

They smelled like history.

With careful fingers he took a book out and
held it, gently turning the pages. It was all but priceless. His
breath, as they often said in those very same books, caught in his
throat.

It was a
Ringo
.

A genuine Ringo.

The cover of this fragile paperback showed a
leather-faced gunman against a desert-red background. Ringo, it
said, in giant letters, and below, the fictitious author’s name,
Jeff McNamara. Finally, the individual title of the book, one of
many in that long running Western series. This one was
On The
Road To Kansas City
.