I’ve been subscribing to Interzone for about four years now. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s the UK’s longest running professionally produced science fiction magazine, featuring four or five pieces of goodf quality short fiction every month. It introduced me to Serbian sf writer Zoran Živković and many other excellent writers; the book review section spurred me to get into some of the best genre books I have read (notably George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History); and Nick Lowe’s acerbic film review column, “Mutant Popcorn”, sometimes has me choking with laughter. So does Dave Langford’s column of extracts (and sometimes additional material) to his fanzine Ansible.

So, after 193 issues the sole member of the founding editorial team, David Pringle, has handed over the entire magazine to Andy Cox. And, well, what a difference. The magazine just looks so much more interesting, and the eye-grabbing art on the cover is carried through and integrated onto the inside. The letters column has vanished, probably never to return, but I don’t really miss it. Langford and Lowe remain. There are new columns looking at comics and video games. And there is some really good fiction as well.

My one concern is that the book review columns only gave me the “Go out and buy that” feeling for two books, of which I already have one (River of Gods by Ian McDonald) and the other was already on my “buy on sight in paperback” list (The Iron Council by China Miéville). But as I said not long ago, I am not buying any more books for a while anyway…