Anyone who has seen me in the (more than ample) flesh, will be entirely unsurprised to discover that my idea of a holiday does not involve white water rafting or hiking across unspoilt wildernesses.

No, all I want is a reasonably quiet, well lit room and a stack of reading material.

It must be inside – no reading on the beach, I’m Irish, I start blue and go straight to lobster red if I spend more than twenty seconds in sunlight.

Of course, with a young daughter and a wife whose grew up in a family whose idea of a holiday was a forced march across the Andes, my quest for peace and quiet (or outrageous laziness if you believe those who stare at my prostrate, somewhat less than mercurial form and sigh in disbelief) is often forlorn.

However, the presence on my most recent holiday of my fantastic niece (who is the same age as my daughter and the two of them ran each other dizzy) and various other members of my family (who distracted my wife) meant that I was left more or less in peace.

That meant that I got through my pile of Interzones (206-210), a bundle of History Todays, a sheaf of Scientific Americans, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s 60 Days and Counting, Ken Macleod’s The Execution Channel, Cormac McCarthy’s depressingly conservative No Country for Old Men and Douglas Coupland’s fantastically nutty jPod. And I got about half way through John Meaney’s Bone Song.

I’m going to talk about 60 Days and Counting and The Execution Channel in another post – I want to give them some space. And I might come back to Coupland although what, exactly, I might say about him I don’t know.

On reading Interzone, I was pleased to find a high number of stories I really enjoyed published in recent issues – at least one excellent story in each issue is a pretty strong showing.

In 206 Tim Akers “Distro” almost totally lost me with a confusing opening and a apparent deliberate obtuseness. But, when it all came together, I ended up liking it a great deal. Sadly, I never warmed at all to Jamie Barras’s “The Beekeeper” – it was a number of nice ideas (especially the bees) in need of a more coherent story. By contrast Will McIntosh’s “The New Chinese Wives” managed to take a cute idea and tie it to a strong story to very fine effect. Robert Davies “The Ship” is one of those big-scale stories that take in the whole life of the universe but feature no real characters – sadly not my thing at all. Jae Brim’s “The Nature of the Beast” didn’t work for me either. Clone stories are hard to do well – especially clone stories that rely on the similarities between the clone’s life and the originals. I felt I’d read the story before. Stand-out in this issue was Chris Beckett’s “Karel’s Prayer” – a genuinely interesting take on the nature of individuality and the soul wrapped up in a clever sf story. Chris Beckett delivers consistently high quality stories and I’m already looking forward to reading his new novel Marcher next year.

207 got off to a flying start with Dave Hoing’s excellent “The Purring of Cats” – my only reservation about this story is that if you replaced the fact that one character had sex with an alien with a more modest sexual “deviation” then this story would work just as well but wouldn’t be in the slightest bit sf. Suzanne Palmer’s “Spheres” is a likeable slice of frontier sf – with the usual hyper-competent colonists surviving by their not inconsiderable wits. There’s almost nothing in the story that couldn’t have been written at any point since the 1930s, but it isn’t any the worse for that. Once again the issues shorter stories – Daniel Kaysen’s “Clocks” and Wendy Waring’s “Stonework” left me least satisfied. I really couldn’t get my head around what “Clocks” was trying to say, though I concede the cleverness of the structure, while “Stonework” starts with a premise (one man alone on a planet investigating extraordinary archaeology without sign of back-up or any particularly advanced technology) that left me scratching my head and wondering why. David Mace is either a supremely confident writer or a very lucky one – because only a brave man or an idiot would invite comparisons between their work and that of John Brunner (for my money sf’s finest, bar none). But Mace’s “Frankie on Zanzibar” stands up under the pressure of references to Brunner’s best books (Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider) to deliver a surprising story about a hyper-intelligent little girl setting herself free from the corporation who created her and turning the tables on the adult world set against the kind of crumbling dystopia familiar from Brunner’s writing. “Frankie on Zanzibar” was, for me, an outstandingly enjoyable story.

In 208 Paul Meloy’s “Islington Crocodiles” was excellent and “Empty Clouds” by GD Leeming was very good. Jay Lake’s “Where Water Meets the Sky” didn’t really go anywhere but it didn’t go anywhere in a heartwarming style. “The Star Necromancers” by Alexander Marsh Freed didn’t really spark for me. Jason Stoddard’s writing seems to really divide readers – I think I fall on the generally positive side but I especially liked his contribution to this issue of Interzone – “Softly Shining in the Forbidden Dark” – a distant (both in time and space) struggle between humanity’s representatives (a post-human and an AI) and an implacable, barely graspable, alien threat. And caught in the middle, is a fragile and possibly innocent fourth alien species. This story seemed to best represent the issue’s stated theme of “sensawunda”. It packed a lot into its short story format but I particularly liked his ocean-based singing alien and the way the relationship between the “human” characters played out.

I’m a simple minded soul, really. I like my prose to be direct and to have meaning, and I just can’t get on with the much heralded Hal (Ink) Duncan – whose story “The Whenever At The City’s Heart” opens Interzone 209, the magazine’s 25^th anniversary issue. His writing is full of phrases that please the ear and play on a shared sense of smug cleverness between the reader and writer but which don’t say anything. He seems unable to choose one word to describe anything so, instead, we get a torrent. Some hail this a stylistic marvel, but it just frustrate me. This story is riddled instances of the over-enunciation of what are, frankly, rather mundane ideas. Duncan could learn a great deal from M John Harrison – whose “The Good Detective” is a finely constructed piece of heart-rending understatement. It absolutely captivated me and had me considering and reconsidering its meaning for many days afterwards. Alastair Reynold’s “The Sledge-Maker’s Daugther” is an atypical piece from him – no vast space-canvases here – but a post-apocalyptic setting and a rather domestic story. It was, however, very nicely done and perhaps the most straightforwardly enjoyable story here. I’d like to read more on this world. I’ve not read any of Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love novels and “Big Cat” (set in that universe) didn’t convince me I wanted to. It was alright – a nice mix of ancient and modern mythologies but it felt out of place here, as if it belonged to an older era of Interzone. Jamie Barras’s “Winter” was readable, but I guessed the “surprise” ending very early on and the mix of alternate history and alien abduction didn’t work for me. In an issue with excellent stories by Harrison and Reynolds, it is to Daniel Kaysen’s credit that the one I admired most was his “Tears for Godzilla” – a curious love story with zombies and ghosts and, of course, Godzilla, that takes the fantastic into the everyday and was both funny and poignant, a kind of geek lament. I loved it.

Finally Interzone 210. Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s “The Final Voyage of La Riaza” isn’t really my kind of thing – pirates and flying ships and salty sea dogs tend to turn me off – so it is to Blaschke’s credit that I not only got to the end of the story but left it behind with happy thoughts. By refusing the obvious path of softening his protagonist as the story developed he retained my interest when it might otherwise have drained away. Diego Brazo started a bastard and he finishes a bastard. I liked what Rachel Swirsky was trying to say with “Heartstrung” – a parable about the intense pressures on young women – but I found the fairytale aspect of the story frustrating, the characterisation crude and the prose a little plodding. “Preachers” by Tim Lees has a fairly typical post-apocalyptic mid-Western American setting and a couple of nice scenes and images but it felt more like the sketch of a longer story than the finished article. Tim Aker’s “Tote” has a group of losers murder an alien and paying the price. There’s a nice final scene where the kids get their comeuppance but it wasn’t a story that gripped or that stays long in the imagination. David Ira Cleary’s “Dr Abernathy’s Dream Theatre” has a faintly interesting idea at its heart – the viewing of people’s dreams through the medium of mime – but there’s no story, no engaging characters and no obvious point (except an odd excursion into the promotion of drugs for all). I thought this was the weakest story in the weakest issue of the five I read here. However, the issues best was delivered by Steven Francis Murphy with thhhhe stand-out story with “Tearing Down Tuesday” the story of an abused boy and his abused robot companion. It was harsh and hard to read but very strongly written and a brave story.