Blue Shifting contains short stories and novellas from Brown’s early career, two of them are original to the collection. Looking back at them it is striking how many of his recurring themes and tropes mark these tales. The typical Brown character is a misfit of some kind or a man awkward with women; a common plot driver is of people’s pasts hounding their presents; the typical setting is an artist’s colony or else somewhere secluded, usually on a far-flung planet.

The Death of Cassandra Quebec
Eva Hovanda, a minor artist, attends the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the sole true work of art by Nathaniel Maltravers (a commemoration of the death of his wife) and rediscovers her wiped memories of the event.

Piloting
On Nea Kikhládes, a world of augmented and even Supra Sapient humans, the Primitivist artist Benedict Wellard is preparing his final piece. The pilot he has requested to animate the fifteen years dead body of his daughter plays an unexpected role. This story is slightly flawed by the fact that Brown withholds a crucial item of information until the denouement.

The Art of Acceptance
An oddly affecting love story – or two – set in Brown’s Engineman universe but firmly on Earth. A tale of cloning, disfigurement and, two other familiar Brown tropes, a private detective and Eastern influence. Despite the title, no artists though.

The Disciples of Apollo
A man suffering from a terminal condition known as The Syndrome goes (after selling his classical record collection! Nothing dates so fast as the future) to a hospice where those so afflicted wait to die. He eventually, and for the first time, finds love.

Elegy Perpetuum
An artist who contends that an enduring work of art is worth more than an individual’s life is faced with a fateful decision.

The Song of Summer
A middle-aged man returns to the scene of his youth and his first, lost, only, love.

Epsilon Dreams
A well-plotted tale set on Altair II in a time when the penalty for murder is memory wiping and Encoded Identity Inserts allow personalities to be transferred to other bodies after death. Brown brings both these elements together in another story of emotional shipwreck.

Blue Shifting
At 5 am every day, surrounded by a blue radiance, Gregory Janner mysteriously shifts location from continent to continent. Eventually he falls in with a group of others similarly afflicted. This story did contain the rather pleasing typo of a “billowed” command, but also the more oxymoronic construction, “markedly unremarkable.”

In all these stories, as with those of a major influence on Brown’s work, Michael G Coney, well reflected in this book, the focus is always on human motivation, on how much of an emotional driver both love and loss are. This is SF with a human heart.

Despite his relative lack of height – only 5′ 7″ – his goal scoring record for Dumbarton is outstanding, 205 goals in 231 games. That 205 is the club record for goals scored.

He was part of that late 1950s team over whom grown men drooled in nostalgia in later years and I actually saw him play – maybe in his first spell with the club but certainly in his second. (I was very young then.)

Hughie scored all four of Dumbarton’s goals in an amazing game at Gayfield in season 1958-9 when Dave Easson got all five for Arbroath.

One of my earliest Sons memories is of Hughie taking over in goal one game against Cowdenbeath -€“ no substitutes at all, never mind goalies, in those days. He was pretty good at stopping them as I recall, but we still lost that game.

Hughie Gallacher, 1931-2013. So it goes.

You may remember some years ago I posted a photo of the fountain in Beveridge Park with its water frozen. For a while the pool around the fountain seemed devoid of fish. It must have been restocked because I was able to get this shot of quite a few carp. I was lucky with this. Unless the sun’s angle is right it’s difficult to see the fish.

It’s a good tune. Lloyd Webber used it several times.

It’s not usually this lyric people think of though.

Novella no. 2 from TTA Press, publishers of Interzone and Black Static.

This is a strange atmospheric piece, very well written.* It is set in a Greece where iPads and emails are in everyday use and holographic people are difficult to discern from real ones but triremes roam the seas and Carthage has fought a war with Corinth within the past 100 years.

When narrator Layla Vargas was young her mother was executed in a bizarre way for having unnatural powers. Layla has now grown and set out for a new life in Atoll City. On the bus on the way she meets an old woman who will influence her future. Layla’s uncommon ability to sew tapestries attracts the attention of a woman whose son has a strange disease and who wishes Layla to cure him. Layla is reluctant to be thought unusual.

Despite the SF trappings there is throughout the feel of fantasy and the dénouement is firmly fantastical. It was refreshing to read a piece in that vein not firmly rooted in mediævality.

The writing is measured and beautifully modulated, the characters rounded and believable. The story concluded a bit like a popped balloon though, all the intrigue that had been carefully built up thereafter more or less dribbling away. It was as if Allan had come up against her word limit and had to find a way to stop. That’s a pity as there was scope here for more exploration of the scenario and greater length. Allan knows what she is doing though and does it well.

*It is a pity, however, that in a novella entitled Spin there is a “span” count of 1.

Quite why this has been allowed to happen escapes me. The 30 SFL clubs have now shackled themselves to – effectively been taken over by – an organisation, the Scottish Premier League, which has been nothing short of a disaster. During its short existence many of its clubs have found themselves in deep financial difficulties. The demise of the largest of these, Rangers, gave the SFL an opportunity to lever much more advantage from that situation than it has been able to achieve. Not the least of the undesirable aspects of the new body – to be called the Scottish Professional Football League – is that the top division clubs (the old SPL) have a stranglehold on any further developments in that the voting structure of the new body means any two of them can veto a proposal as an 11-1 majority among the top division clubs will be required for a change.

The SPL was originally set up on the apparent belief that the clubs at that time in the highest positions in Scottish Football’s structure were somehow or other better than the rest and could more or less cast them adrift. (The Rangers debacle showed how misguided that idea was. Without an SFL as a safety net there may not have been a continuity Rangers.) But what gave those particular clubs the right to decide that? To lift up the drawbridge after themselves, which is what they did by having only one promotion/relegation position.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary the 11-1 voting arrangements suggest the present top 12 still are of the belief that they are the best; or at any rate the most competent. The provision of an additional possible promotion place from tier 2 via a play-off is welcome but for how long will it last? Moreover the new body’s overall voting structure is heavily weighted in favour of clubs who happen temporarily to be in the first or second tier. I fully expect a few years down the line that access to the top two divisions of the SPFL will become restricted in the way it once was to the SPL – or even for the top two tiers to vote the lower two away.

The SPL was (is) far too money grubbing and venal. I have not been in the slightest interested in watching its “product” either live or on television. I don’t expect my interest in those “top” 12 clubs to change now that the others have been drawn into their web. The true soul of Scottish football, its beating heart, lies in those other clubs; the ones who provide a focus for their community, cut their coats according to their cloth and do not seek to overreach themselves. I welcome the inception of a Lowland League by the way, a much needed intermediate for the establishment of a route to the (now) SPFL for clubs traditionally outwith the main leagues and for those who may find themselves falling out of them. I only hope my beloved Dumbarton FC won’t end up there one day.

Thanks again, Duncan.

I hope this means things will function better than they have recently.

Edited to add: Looking through recent posts it seems the move has caused a problem with old posts having an apostrophe (‘) or dash (-) in them not appearing as they were originally typed. I’ve amended a few of these but I doubt I will be bothered going back to change them all.

This accompanied Nina Allan’€™s Spin, a TTA novella which I have promised to review here. My review of Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner appears in this issue, which I assume I received as a contributor’s copy.

The Machinehouse Worker’€™s Song by Steven J Dines
Men work stoically at their shifts in a machinehouse which they cannot leave until they succumb to an apparently psychological sickness, or death. The story is set at a time when only two of them remain.

Triolet by Jess Hyslop
Mrs Entwistle grows poems (which seem to be exactly like flowering plants but speak their verses when touched.) One day she gives James and Lisa a triolet. Its repetition presages alteration.

Sentry Duty by Nigel Brown
An alien stands guard for her Sisterhood and interacts with the human whose skycart has landed in their territory. This story would not have been out of place in a 60s SF magazine.

The Angel at the Heart of the Rain by Aliette de Bodard
An immigrant from a war torn country comes to terms with her new existence.

Thesea and Astaurius by Priya Sharma
A reworking of the Minotaur story featuring the woman Thesea. Minos is a blood-crazed madman and Deadalus wields modern technology.

The Core by Lavie Tidhar
Achimwene follows his lover Carmel through Central Station. She is a strigoi, a data vampire to whom the Station’s children are attracted. A strange piece, undermined for me
by the use of the word “faint” once each in the first two lines, describing respectively the light and a glow.

Cat World by Georgina Bruce
Narrated by an eight year old girl, an orphan who lives on the streets with her sister. Flavoured chewing gum takes their minds into Cat World. Her sister disappears and she has to fend for herself.

The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and judged by a panel of professional authors and editors. The winner receives a cash prize, a trophy and publication in Interzone. This year’s winner, selected by Aliette de Bodard and Ian McDonald, was:-

You First Meet the Devil at a Church Fete by Shannon Fay
A well written tale narrated by one Stuart Sutcliffe, who is tempted by the devil with promises of the band he’s in with John and Paul – and George – becoming big. Stuart turns him down. The rest is history.