{"id":64,"date":"2001-09-29T10:06:52","date_gmt":"2001-09-29T17:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/09\/29\/64.html"},"modified":"2001-09-29T10:06:52","modified_gmt":"2001-09-29T17:06:52","slug":"the-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/09\/29\/the-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I picked up a few copies of Interzone<\/a><\/cite> some months back at a bookstore going-out-of-business sale (sadness!). I'd seen the magazine before, but had remembered it as cheaply produced and not terribly interesting. But either my memory is flawed, or things have changed.<\/p>\n

The magazine is now slickly produced and often very interesting. The two most interesting things about the issue I'd picked up were a Charles Stross story called \"Antibodies\" (which neatly tied together several threads that I'd just been reading about, including strong AI and the Vingean Singularity<\/a>) and the Nick Lowe film review, which casually dropped off-handed comments like \"the Marvel Universe is the single largest narrative artifact in human history\" (quoted from memory, probably not exactly right). (Rob later pointed out that any long-running soap opera could probably be considered bigger than the Marvel Universe—five hours of filmed story a week, the equivalent of a hundred feature films a year, for (in some cases) twenty or more years.)<\/p>\n

(By the way, \"Antibodies\" has now been reprinted in Gardner's latest Year's Best Science Fiction.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n

I picked up a couple of other back issues, liked what I read of them, and decided to subscribe. The magazine isn't always up to the high standard set by that first issue, but it's still good and still thought-provoking, and there seem to generally be several particularly felicitous turns of phrase in a given issue. Even the letters-to-the-editor column (titled \"Interaction\") is fairly often interesting; my favorite line from the issue I'm reading now is from a letter by Alasdair Montgomery:<\/p>\n

\n

I was about to write in support of Paul Beardsley's appeal for more discussion of fiction in \"Interaction\" (although already I can see a flaw in that course of action) . . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nick Lowe's reviews continue to be almost worth the price of the magazine by themselves, btw. And David Langford's \"Ansible Link<\/a>\" is also a lot of fun, particularly the \"Thog's Masterclass\" sections, with dreadful quotes from published fiction.<\/p>\n

Interzone<\/cite> keeps showing up on the Hugo ballot in the \"Best Semiprozine\" category; I'm not quite sure why it's considered a semipro (circulation? Pay rates? They don't pay by the word, but dividing their pay rates by preferred wordcounts suggests that they pay more than the British equivalent of 3 cents\/word for most stories), but imo it stacks up well against the print prozines.<\/p>\n

URLs:<\/p>\n

Extropian commentary on the Singularity<\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked up a few copies of Interzone some months back at a bookstore going-out-of-business sale (sadness!). I’d seen the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}