Interzone: The First Anthology. This item is unavailable.Interzone: The First Anthology

Interzone was initially produced by an unpaid collective of eight people John Clute, Alan Dorey, Malcolm Edwards, Colin Greenland, Graham James, Roz Kaveney, Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. According to Dorey, the group had been fans of the science fiction magazine New Worlds and wanted to create a "New Worlds for the 1980s, something that would publish only great fiction and be a proper outlet for new writers."

This volume contains a dozen stories selected from the pages of Interzone, a British magazine of science fiction and fantasy, plus one never published before. It is a diverse group of pieces, in terms of both quality and style, for the magazine specializes in experimental forms. Among the best stories are Geoff Ryman's "O Happy Day!," a grim vision of a fascistic matriarchal society; Scott Bradfield's "The Flash! Kid," about an ancient otherworldly artifact that is actually a time-bomb, and of the unfortunate child through whom it works; John Shirley's "What Cindy Saw," a nightmarish detailing of a hallucinatory paranoid psychosis; J. G. Ballard's "The Object of the Attack," which takes deadly aim at our propensity to follow and assassinate demagogues; and Michael Blumlein's darkly humorous exercise in poetic justice against the body politic, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration." These tales reveal a political sophistication beyond that of most American science fiction and at their bestthe Ballard, for instancea quality of writing rarely encountered.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.