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The Asimov's issue with a February 2002 cover date apparently reached some subscribers today. Meanwhile, the Interzone issues dated September and October 2001 reached me yesterday and today, respectively. But I suppose that's to be expected when subscribing to a magazine that's published an ocean and a continent away.

I continue to be impressed by Interzone's lettercol. Partly it's the oddities, like the letter from the retired Canadian gentleman who just started reading SF three years ago and is asking for tips on how to not be overwhelmed by the vast amount of good reading material that he's gorging on. Partly it's the passionate and opinionated readers: in particular, issue after issue contains hard slams from readers about the amateurishness of Evelyn Lewes's annoying TV column (see below). And partly (perhaps mostly) it's the sense I get from reading it that this is a community—a squabbling one, certainly, and one with widely varying opinions on many matters, but a community nonetheless. It's the kind of place where Greg Egan can write in to recommend that fans of Philip K. Dick should go watch Memento. It feels a little like a very slow and very low-volume newsgroup or mailing list in some ways. (Okay, so presumably that really means that newsgroups and mailing lists are very fast, very high-volume lettercols.)

But the thing that stands out the most in the lettercol is the language. Where else would you get a letter to the editor that complains about the "bloated diction [of regular fiction contributor] Richard Calder" that ends by saying: "the joke has worn very thin indeed, under its squamous rind of thick-laden verbosity." Squamous! When was the last time you saw a letter to the editor that used the word squamous, much less used it so appropriately? (I can't think of a better description of the one Calder novella I read.)

It's also fun to get the British take on some things. I was particularly intrigued to note, a month or two back, the description of Connie Willis that appeared in the "Books Received" pages at the end of an issue:

. . .judging by the almost embarrassing number of Hugos and Nebulas and other such awards she has won, Willis is probably the most honoured sf writer in America (among sf fans, at any rate), but she remains somewhat obscure in the UK. . . [Passage is] her first novel to be published [in the UK] in nearly a decade.

I mean, it would never have occurred to me that Connie Willis wouldn't be as well-known in the UK as she is in the US, especially given that she's written multiple award-winning pieces of fiction set in the UK.

I mentioned Evelyn Lewes above; she's the Interzone TV reviewer who started by trashing Farscape; when fans of that show objected, she proceeded to trash Babylon 5. Since she knew she had no interest in B5 from the start, she decided she didn't want to have to watch the whole damn five years of the show, so instead she watched the four movies. All of which are, imo, at least as bad as the worst parts of the series. She came to some mistaken conclusions (based in one case on being too bored to pay much attention), and didn't bother to check her facts by consulting a fan or any of the huge Web sites devoted to the series. When people called her on this lack of fact-checking, she responded that her point in the column was to talk about TV, and stuff on the Web isn't TV, so she has no interest in looking it up. While I agree that one shouldn't have to read a Web site to be able to follow a TV series, it does seem to me that if someone's going to trash a series they've barely watched, the least they can do is make sure they've got their facts straight. Anyway, it's kinda fun to read letter after irate letter calling for the editors to dismiss her, and for the only response to be another polite comment from Lewes noting that it's "gratifying" that so many people are interested in her column. I momentarily thought we at SH ought to start publishing regular commentary by someone who's so wildly offbase that people would stop by just to see how badly the person could screw up this time—an intentional attempt to stir up controversy—but it occurred to me that that's more or less what Serious Readers expect from the Web, so I don't think we could get away with it; it would drive away too many readers.

The IZ fiction's been a mixed bag lately. There's almost always at least one story that's intriguing in some way, and there are occasional moments of sheer brilliance (such as Ian R. MacLeod's "Isabel of the Fall," which I talked about a month ago). But there are also stories that I just don't see the point of. Most recently, a story about a teleporter technology that splits the teleported person into two identical copies, one of which stays at the sending end and the other appears at the receiving end. A cute idea, previously explored by Fredric Brown in his 1951 story "The Hatchetman." (Given that this year's the 50th anniversary of that story and that the author of this story is also named Brown, I begin to wonder if there was some sort of intentional homage going on there.) But this take on it is filled with story-logic holes—the protagonist behaves rather stupidly on several occasions, in ways that make no sense for someone who's risen to a position of reasonable prominence in what we're told is a totalitarian future society (though the level of totalitarian control seems to shift widely over the course of the story). Not only that, but the key situation that the plot hinges on requires other characters to also behave really stupidly. Yet another story that seems designed to remind me that different people have different tastes in fiction; clearly the editors liked this enough to publish it.

But I don't want to end on a negative note; I should reiterate that Nick Lowe's film-review column and David Langford's "Ansible Link" continue to be wonderful, and that the fiction's high points are very high indeed.