How aware are you of the origins of Interzone?
I’m
reasonably aware of the magazine’s history, but I make no claim to academic
rigour in respect of this. I’m not an
obsessive sf historian!
There’s
a fine line between being a raconteur or a bore, but I’d like to risk relating
my personal history in relation to David Pringle’s Interzone, in particular my initial collision with the magazine in
WH Smith in Southampton. It was late 1982,
I think, and I was working down there as a researcher for a management
consultancy, doing work I found morally dubious and making myself thoroughly
miserable. This was a really bad time for me: I didn’t have the insight or
sense of direction to change jobs; I wasn’t enamoured with a socio-political
landscape in which greed, careerism and self-interest flourished; and the
post-punk cultural scene was predictable, unchallenging and trammelled by a
fashionable obsession with gloss and surface. It may sound familiar to younger people in 2014.
Anyway,
at some stage of my visit to the South Coast I slipped out of the late lamented
Polygon Hotel (known locally as the dead parrot for obvious reasons) and
treated myself to a copy of this new magazine. I’ve probably projected my own needs and views
onto Interzone, but it became a
little beacon of hope for me – along with the new Channel 4, the anarchist
newspaper Freedom, the radical
writers working in Glasgow (including Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) and, of
course, Michael Moorcock, whose cultural criticism and fiction stood in
opposition to the ghastliness of the early 1980s. And I’m grateful to David Pringle for his
role in that.
I
became a regular but non-subscribing reader in the early years. I’ve just been scrabbling about on the top
shelf on a very tall bookcase looking for copies from the late 1980s and early
1990s. I nearly broke my neck, but I forgive you as it’s provided some
interesting moments of nostalgia. The
work that attracted me to early Pringle-era Interzone was Angela Carter, Pamela
Zoline, John Sladek, Rachel Pollack, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard, Barrington
Bayley, Keith Roberts, Thomas Disch, M John Harrison and, of course, Michael
Moorcock. Many of those writers, as I’m
sure you’ll have noticed, were associated with New Worlds and I think I saw Interzone
as continuing in the risk-taking tradition of Moorcock’s magazine. Having said that, it also introduced me to
writers whose work was new to me – Geoff Ryman, John Crowley, John Shirley,
and Kim Newman, Colin Greenland, Greg Egan, Cherry Wilder, William Gibson, Beil
Ferguson, John Gribbin, Gary Kilworth and Bruce Sterling.
As
the years passed Interzone became a
bit too hard sf for my own tastes, but I kept in touch with it as an occasional
reader and still enjoyed much of what I read. In terms of history, I know David Pringle was supported by a group that
included John Clute, Colin Greenland (a massively talented writer and critic
who I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing for the Andy Cox-era Interzone) and Alan Dorey, a writer and
broadcaster who does a cracking music
programme called The Musical Box, for Forest FM in Dorset. Well worth catching online.
Do you see yourself as continuing in the tradition of
David Pringle and previous editors?
I
can’t answer for Andy Cox of other members of the editorial group but I certainly
see a degree of continuity with the David Pringle era. David Pringle took the name from a risk-taking
and experimental collection of stories by William Burroughs and it reflects
very well the cutting edge and eclectic nature of his magazine. Andy Cox’s roots as a publisher and editor
are in the slipstream magazine The Third
Alternative, which published sf, fantasy horror and slipstream
stories. TTA
Press’ successor to The
Third Alternative focuses exclusively on horror, crime stories
are published in Crimewave and the sf, fantasy, surreal, weird
and otherwise idiosyncratic genre fiction we publish finds its way into Interzone. It’s still
eclectic and we still like to take risks. Like David, Andy sets high literary standards
for the stories we include. We continue
encourage a degree of stylistic experiment and we’re interested in behaviour in
extreme situations, diverse psychologies and liminal experiences. Like David Pringle we look for stories that
offer new mythologies to enable us to make sense of our experiences and
thoughts. If there is a disconnect
between the late-Pringle era and the Cox-era it may be that the latter is a
little less focused on scientific and technological development, but I
wouldn’t like to have to defend that under rigorous academic examination!
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What do you consider your greatest achievement in your
time at the magazine?
If
I may I’ll choose something from a personal perspective that’s about
opportunities I’ve been given. In terms of achievement I’d rather identify
something on behalf of the editorial collective.
There
are two things I’m really delighted to have been able to do. One is to have been able to take part in
interviews with writers such as Ken McLeod, Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett,
John Shirley and Susanna Clarke. The
other, and the more important, has been to help find really impressive work by
new and developing writers, some of whom had gone on to establish formidable
reputations. And I think that brings us
onto the greatest achievement element. We’ve passed a number of important milestones: 10 years of the TTA Press
‘flavour’ of Interzone under Andy Cox’s stewardship; we’ve contributed to
Interzone being published for more than 30 years; only around a dozen Nebula award-winning stories were published in magazines and one of those is a story we selected, Eugie Foster’s 'Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast'; we’re
the current holder of the British Fantasy Society award for Best Magazine /
Periodical; and we’re nominated (again) for a Hugo Award in the Best
Semiprozine category. All of which is
very encouraging, it’s nice to receive recognition, but I think the thing I’m
most proud of is helping Andy Cox set very exacting standards in terms of
literary worth, originality and storytelling energy when we select tales for Interzone. We have a good record in terms of Interzone
stories being selected for prestigious anthologies, which is far more important
than winning awards and celebrating our longevity. Most of the time Andy and I converge very
quickly on what’s promising but not quite right for us, what’s brilliant,
what’s bad and what’s simply baffling. It’s
a painful process at times – particularly when I get an email-based poke in the
ribs for exhibiting spectacularly poor taste. Over the past 10 years we’ve worked with some absolutely brilliant
writers – Nina Allan, Neil Williamson, Jason Sanford, Aliette de Bodard,
Georgina Bruce, Suzanne Palmer… That list, off the top of my head, reflects
something that isn’t our achievement
but it is something we should celebrate. Over the past decade we’ve seen an increasing number of stories by women
writers in the mag.
Do you think that science fiction has become more
‘mainstream’ in popular culture over the three decades since Interzone was
founded?
I
think it’s roughly as mainstream as it was in the early 1980s. There have been some notable entries into
genre storytelling by writers very much associated with literary fiction, for
example Jane Roger’s The Testament of
Jessie Lamb and Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road. But hasn’t there always been
this traffic across the sf&f vs ‘litfic’ border? Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Virginia
Wolfe, Don Delillo, Richard Brautigan, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain …? I suppose we could point to Haruki Murakami,
Will Self and George Saunders as writers who take a hatchet to genre boundaries
by mixing sf, fantasy, crime and absurd realism throughout their work. But even that isn’t something that’s developed
in the past 30 years. But all three of
those writers draw on the work of Pynchon and Vonnegut, with the same cavalier
approach to literary and genre tropes and techniques whose careers took off in
the 1960s.
The
concerns of genre and mainstream writers have changed over the years – I’d
argue more attention is paid to issues of environmental sustainability, and
debt seems to be a more frequently recurring motif. We receive a lot of stories dealing with
survival in extremis, the misuse of power and control and shifts of
identity. But these are perennial themes
in sf and fantasy.
I
think the literary mainstream and inventive genres revivify each other by
trading structures, tools, techniques and obsessions. But I believe that has always been the case.
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| Interzone 221; artwork by Adam Tredowski |
How do you see the future of Interzone and more
widely, (science fiction) publishing?
Blimey. Isn’t it interesting how sf editors fall
apart and become mumbling wrecks when you ask them about the future? I don’t think we operate in a prophetic way:
we celebrate the wondrous and astonishing in storytelling and marvel at the
creative way writers and artists invent, remix and repurpose ideas and
symbols. If we get hung up on making
predictions Interzone might become
predictable. It’s not our role to
predict the next big thing, just to recognise it when it ambles to the door of
TTA Towers.
There
is however one area in which a spot of crystal gazing is essential. Magazine production isn’t cheap and
distribution is really, really expensive, particularly if you have an
international readership and particularly if there is a lot of fluctuation
between currencies. So the online
publishing option has its attractions. Having said that, a lot of readers enjoy Interzone as an object (with, we hope, stunning artwork and colour)
that drops through their post box every two months. I’m part of the generation for whom the
graphic interface version of internet arrived in their thirties and I still
prefer to read from paper. I think there
will be a need for print publication for the foreseeable future, but the
e-version of the mag will become increasingly important. Sustainability and
cost will both become increasingly important issues I suspect. The big problem is whether people will pay
for online literature – I suspect the shift to e-publishing will exacerbate the
crisis relating to paying creative people for cultural output. People seem increasingly reluctant to
pay. This is reflected, for example, by
the fact that increasing numbers of writers and editors have ‘day jobs’ that
subsidise the work they love doing. This
is a problem for publishing in general rather than sf publishing.
In terms of the
genre, we may see another swing of the pendulum back to technology and science
as a focus for sf; there may be more intense exploration of psychological inner
space; we may see more satirical sf. We may plunge into a period of deep
pessimism with stories that undermine the notion of progress, or we may
experience a wave of high energy optimism focusing on growth, development,
possibility and problem solving. I don’t know. The message to our
contributors and potential contributors is – as always – surprise
us.
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