The INTERZONE Newsletter // 26 April 2023
A preview of Vinayak Varma’s art for Jonathan Laidlow’s ‘Strung Along in Seaforth’ (forthcoming in IZ 295), plus news of new fiction in IZ Digital…
Welcome to Seaforth
Below is a panel from Vinayak Varma’s Hieronymus Bosch/Hergé-inspired triptych illustrating ‘Strung Along in Seaforth’, a delightfully weird story by Jonathan Laidlow.
Explore more of this Seaside of Earthly Horrors in Interzone #295. Or even better, subscribe!
New IZ Digital Fiction
Also this month, new fiction in IZ Digital:
‘Sunless’, a story by Lyle Hopwood (Juliana Pinho’ art for that one is above)
Tomey a bioengineered fieldworker with chloroplast skin and sapphire blood, wants a chance to start afresh off-world – all he has to do is jump onto an upbound ship as it thunders into the stratosphere.
& ‘Count Your Blessings’ by David Dumouriez:
The inhabitants of Colony 48.9 are on course to destroy themselves, and worse, they are so unstimulating that Watcher and Follower counts are critically low.
But at least they have Larry David.
‘Sunless’ is Lyle Hopwood’s IZ Digital debut and her third story for Interzone (well, her fourth, counting the competition-winning ‘David Cronenberg’s ALIEN – Novelization by J.G. Ballard’ that appeared in Interzone #75)
‘Count Your Blessings’ is David Dumouriez’s IZ debut as well. You can find more of David’s stories online, but I’ve promised him I won’t share the links.
Become an IZ Digital member for 3 euro a month to read those and new stories by Giselle Leeb, Andrew Hook, Dale Smith, Jennifer Jeanne McArdle, and Cécile Cristofari…
You can also read free fiction in IZ Digital, including ‘Hinoeuma’, by Fábio Fernandes, the ‘Uprooted’ by Steve Toase, and ‘The Devil’s Curve’ by Michael Kelly!
From ‘Hinoeuma’
Working for the Company can be really exhausting.
I remember I started with them because life on Earth was shit. Too much pollution, too much violence, too little money, too little chance of being happy. When Mom died, I didn’t have money for the burial. At that time, the few relatives I had didn’t even show up. So, fuck you very much, right?
From ‘Uprooted’
By the year we became homeless the forests were planted out across the oceans to try and keep up with demand. Vast floating mats of knotted roots anchored in place by thin tendrils aching for the water below. We watched them buckle and rise on the tides as the evictors threw our possessions into the street.
Even as we tried to pick everything up, the arborists were already embedding seeds in the rooms and walls. We had to abandon most of our belongings. Behind us they dropped childhood books and clothes into the mulcher. Leaves unfurled, the rate of growth accelerating as each one grasped sunlight from the cloudless sky. Within days the stone would be soil, the pages fertiliser. It didn’t matter to us. We were already homeless. My mother told me not to look back, but I did anyway.
& from ‘The Devil’s Curve’
It’s late October and already a thin crust of ice covers the flattened fields either side of the dark ribbon of road. The waning sun glints weakly off the dead grass, glitters briefly, then dies. It’s pretty, in a Canadian gothic sort of way. The way things die quick up here. Like Mingus. Except maybe it wasn’t quick. And maybe Mingus wasn’t quite dead.
All those stories, and beautiful art, at IZ Digital.
That’s all for now.
Thanks for reading. Please share the newsletter link far and wide. Each and every boost helps!
Warmly,
Gareth Jelley, Editor & Publisher
Interzone & IZ Digital
‘Yesterday’s lips are plump and forever distracting: red today, to match her silks. She’s round, beautiful, with soft, thick, inviting arms that Cimcim has slept inside before when shelter was scarce. Cimcim never says, I want your shelter, whether I need it or not. I want to hold and be held. I want to linger. She never asks, Can I kiss you without raising expectation? Could you love someone who doesn’t want more?’
— Carlie St. George, ‘An Atlas of Names and Footprints and Thoughts Unsaid’, IZ Digital
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