Interzone March-April 2011
In the mail this week is the latest Interzone. The fiction features a novella by Nina Allan, “The Silver Wand,” and stories by Tim Lees (“Crosstown Traffic”), Chris Butler (“Tell Me Everything”), and Ray Clule (“Tethered to the Cold and the Dying”).
The magazine is the print home for David Lanford’s “Ansible Link,” a miscellany of genre news. I found this item from the regularly featured “As Others See Us” department particularly humorous:
Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-themed novel Never Let Me Go can’t be sf even though he says it is, because he’s respectable. To clarify: “It isn’t science fiction–indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours (sic) to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own.” (Guardian)
That certainly clears things up.
Oh, gosh! I’ve been reading Naomi Novik’s 
Only a short post today, following up on 
It’s a great week for lovers of fantasy fiction!
These past two weeks I’ve found myself writing here about science fiction, or speculative fiction, as the literature of ideas. It seems to me that ‘the literature of ideas’ implies something other than what we normally find in sf; I feel that it suggests writing that uses ideas to establish the structure of a work, instead of relying on traditional narrative. I’ve found a couple of early examples in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. As a way to wrap up the discussion, I thought this week I’d look at a more recent example of what I mean by the literature of ideas: Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.
Here is how this morsel describes himself: