Tag Archives: Interzone

INTERZONE 294

https://interzone.press/60CD7B2B-CEF7-4D56-8E13-F9CD24A14FBE

MYY PRESS 2023

Edited by Gareth Jelley

Interzone #294 features writing by Daniel Bennett, Gautam Bhatia, Georgina Bruce, Kat Clay, R.T. Ester, Philip Fracassi, Alexander Glass, Louise Hughes, Kelly Jennings, David Langford, Nick Lowe, Laura Mauro, Val Nolan, Mike O’Driscoll, Marisca Pichette, J.F. Sebastian, Liviu Surugiu, and Aliya Whiteley; and art by Martin Hanford, Dante Luiz, Alex Maniezo, Dave Senecal, and Vinayak Varma.

My previous reviews of Interzone: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/interzone/

An earlier publication by MYY PRESS: https://manyoyo.press/only-connect/

When I read the fiction, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below….

VINES by Daniel Bennett

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‘A-K AB-AT’ 

This is, for me, a thoughtfully lingering dystopia or would-be utopia, possibly both or neither! Beautifully and sinuously – and sluggishly like the vines themselves – conjuring up various optimisations of life as a Gaia or Gestalt, where the various blights, such as avian flu, a civil war, the death blogger and now the vines as triffids, implicate the people and the jobs of work the people do as the result of being factored into some algorithmic lottery … evolving into an installation of found art like a White Ship that inadvertently acted, for me, in mutual,synergy with Denton Welch’s pervasive white elephant in a story I reviewed in the last few days here. All of this effectively told through the relationship of the narrator and his wife Dolores. And the chance creative ricochets between what they were opted to do and what they were actually  suited to doing. I wondered who is meant to fill in the dashes, if not the author or reader as part of their their own ‘work lottery’ in creating the narrator’s vision. The Biblical fact of Noah bringing vines into his ark, as well as animals, is my trial algorithm toward a divine gestalt. (Not forgetting AN ISLAND FOR LOST ASTRONAUTS  by the same author reviewed here, as his own prior algorithms.)

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This story is newly available in INTERZONE DIGITAL.

My previous reviews of Daniel Bennett: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/daniel-bennett/

My previous reviews of Interzone: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/interzone/

My ongoing reviews of single stories by living authors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-single-story-toward-a-novel-world/

Interzone 290-291

EE0BD7DB-9194-4BF6-8E60-749E8600D5CF

TTA PRESS 2021 (my previous reviews HERE)

Stories by Alexander Glass, Tim Major, Lyle Hopwood, Daniel Bennett, Cécile Cristofari, Matt Thompson, John Possidente, Lavie Tidhar, Shauna O’Meara.

A lovely colourfully designed book. See the face on the back cover?

When I read the fiction, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…