A Son of the Rock

Millenium, 1998. 292p.

The book contains two novellas and five shorter stories taking in SF, fantasy, thriller and mainstream. The title novella has quite the most unsympathetic narrator I think I’€™ve ever read. He is supposed to be British and Shepard gets the idioms correct but we use “€œat night”€ rather than “nights”€ and (mostly) don’€™t call the game “€œsoccer.”€ Full marks for the effort though. It’s a strange tale set on a space station beyond the orbit of Mars, where the usual human venalities and appetites abound.

A Little Night Music‘€™s SF gloss features reanimated musicians but is really about a failed marriage.

Human History is set in a post-apocalyptic world where strange creatures known as Captains exert control over the remnants of humanity. Things do not turn out well.

Sports In America is a straightforward tale about a gangland hit that doesn’€™t quite come off. The characters rattle on unnecessarily about baseball and American Football.

The Sun Spider is a fantasy/SF cross where a theoretical physicist has discovered life in the Sun.

All The Perfumes Of Araby, a story published in 1992 but set in 1992 and which has been somewhat overtaken by events in the real world – the Middle East has not evolved in quite the way depicted, there are as yet no inoculations against AIDS – has a female Desert Storm veteran wishing to recapture some of that experience by taking up with a smuggler based in Cairo. The smuggling goes wrong.

Beast Of The Heartland is about a declining boxer who has a chance of one last big payday. Shepard manages to find a new angle on this hoary old scenario.

Apart from the two non-speculative ones the stories as a whole show a tendency to start in the real, solid world and part way through shift into a more fantastic milieu. Their narrators are also keen to tell rather than show and to philosophise. Betrayals are common. The collection as a whole is really just what you’€™d want in fiction.