A Son of the Rock

Traquair House is Scotland’s oldest continuously inhabited house.

House from distance:-

Closer view. there are “new” wings to either side:-

Right side new wing:-

Left side new wing:-

A drawing of Traquair House in earlier days is on one of its internal walls:-

Rear of house, hedged maze in middle ground:-

Penguin, 2024, 249 p. Translated from the Japanese お探し物は図書室まで (O-sagashi mono wa toshoshitsu made, literally “Please go to the library for what you are looking for,”) POPLAR Publishing Company, 2020, by Alison Watts. Illustrations by Rohan Easson.

This book’s title is surely designed to appeal to book lovers. Yet, in a sense, it must be preaching to the converted. Book lovers will all have used libraries and, crucially, already read books and thus need no encouragement to pick one up.

There are five stories within, all with a similar trajectory. Each of the lead characters has a reason to visit the Hatori Community House situated by a local school and gets drawn to its library where the librarian, Sayuri Komachi, recommends books to them and at the same time proffers a gift of a felted toy from the many she spends her time making.

The viewpoint characters are:-

Tomaka, a sales assistant in womenswear at Eden, a Department Store.

Ryo, who works in accounts for a furniture manufacturer but yearns to start an antiques business.

Natsumi, a former magazine editor moved sideways to a less fulfilling role on having had a child.

Hiroya, a thirty-year-old NEET who has neglected his talent for drawing.

Masao, recently retired and feeling a lack of direction.

Unfortunately, this all involves a lot of repetition of information as each character relates the details of their first visit to the Community House in very similar terms. There are also some instances of the relaying of characters’ internal thoughts or reactions which are rendered far too colloquially thus breaking readers’ suspension of disbelief.

There is discussion of the content of the borrowed books (in one case it’s not borrowed, since it’s too heavy to carry far, but rather consulted,) publishing details of which are appended in the Bibliography.

Special pleading for the utility of reading occurs when one of the narrators tells us “Books belong to everybody: the creators, the sellers and the readers.” Similarly, Ms Komachi says to another, “Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer’s intentions, and each reader gains something unique.”

It’s all very easy to read and undemanding but somehow feels inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- Uses British spellings but has the occasional USianism – sidewalk, sneakers, schoolyard, some schoolchildren are said to be in third or fourth grade. Otherwise; “inside in my stockings” (either ‘in my stockings’ or ‘inside my stockings’,) “I did use to talk with him” (did used to.)

One of the buildings at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a former chapel.

When we were there it held pieces by Laura Ellen Bacon who use sustainable Somerset willow to make her sculptures.

The main piece was titled Into Being:-

This is the same piece viewed from the balcony:-

This piece, on the balcony, is Contact 2021:-

In the vestibule of the chapel was Muscle Memory:-

SPFL Tier 4, Stair Park,* 12/9/26.

What a surprise.

A defeat at Stair Park is no novelty but it seems again the manager’s decisions were baffling, including replacing attack-minded players with defenders when we were losing.

It’s worse that we actually took the lead then lost two goals in four minutes (shades of the game at Kelty last month.) We’re just too fragile at the back.

[Edited to add: I see from the highlights that the third goal we lost was a complete joke and we also had a penalty saved.]

That’s now a whole year since an away win. Okay, the manager is only responsible for 18 out of the 22 games in that time, but it kind of speaks for itself, especially since we’ve only won 7 games under him. That’s relegation form.

Watching Sons at the moment is far from enjoyable. Next Saturday against The Spartans could be gruesome.

Owner Mario Lapointe needs to get his finger out.

*LIME Stadium at Stair Park? No thanks.

This is Masayuki Koorida’s Form Twist. (The spheres in the background are by the same artist):-

Also by Masayuki Koorida: Growth. (This looks to me like a V2 rocket or the rocket on the cover of the Tintin story Destination Moon):-

Simeon Barclay: Pittu Pithu Pitoo (the cockerel is part of the sculpture.) Bretton Hall is in the background:-

Sophia Vari: Le Roi et La Reine:-

Suhasini Kejriwal: Garden of Unearthly Delights:-

The Zombies’ second US no 1 – four years after their first She’s Not There in 1974. While the latter did reach no 12 in the UK this one didn’t chart at all. Despite that it’s still fondly remembered.

The Zombies: Time of the Season

In a secluded green area near to the main buildings at Yorkshire Sculpture Park there were two more Daniel Arsham pieces. We happened on them by coming up from the park via this pond:-

View from other side of pond:-

Bronze Eroded Venus of Arles, part of Relics in the Landscape:-

Main park building and Bronze Eroded Bunny:

Reverse view of wall above (Bronze Eroded Venus to left):-

NewCon Press, 2025, 139 p. Reviewed for ParSec 15.

Some while ago sentient ramship UNDSP-14 CORBYN had passed through a human-colonised star system but ignored all its inhabitants’ attempts at communication. However, they exerted themselves to sending after him their one and only light speed ship, the Great Honour, utilizing a D-jump mechanism Corbyn did not have, which folded space to make the distance between two points negligible. Corbyn’s ship had resilience, though, and the Great Honour hadn’t, so was falling apart when it caught up.  Corbyn rescued crew member PurLeeDah and salvaged the D-Jump. Now, at her request, he is returning PurLeeDah to her home system but they are travelling at 0.9999999999c and need to dump velocity by innumerable small collisions to below 0.8c in order then to decelerate “as God and Heinlein intended.” This means transiting the system above its ecliptic for twenty (subjective) seconds, jumping back and doing it again and again, thousands of times, each time making a spectacular light show in the planet’s sky, shedding blue Cherenkov radiation. No wonder the inhabitants, who have, in the many relativistic centuries since launching the Great Honour, regressed to pre-industrial levels, come to call Corbyn the Travelling God as he moves from what they call the Gates of Heaven to Exaltation. It also means PurLeeDah has spent most of the interim in suspended animation.

As time goes by the condition of the cold sleep system deteriorates and Corbyn offers PurLeeDah the possibility of seeking out other star systems, possibly more evolved and able to slow them down more easily, but she declines, wanting to see her own planet again. To slow down more quickly, Corbyn takes a risk.

The overall story is told in nine sections as Corbyn drops in velocity to 0.999999999c, 0.98c, 0.95c, 0.92c, 0.85c, Orbital Velocity, and Stationary (with respect to the planet,) each section beginning with what is happening on Corbyn before giving us a snapshot of the life of humans on the planet as they slowly develop civilisation again, their worship of the Travelling God evolves and the time taken for each transit gradually increases. In effect Morden has put together eight otherwise unconnected stories of the History of the World (PurLeeDah’s world) by using an inventive framing device. (If you were paying attention you may have noticed there were only eight – not nine – velocities mentioned above. The ninth is a valedictory chapter.) Each of the eight stories is peopled with believable characters in convincing scenarios.

I did idly wonder if Morden has read Brian Aldiss’s short story Heresies of the Huge God, with which this has some thematic similarities: but it is of course as possible that he has not. The resemblances are only incidental in any case. Not that it matters. Morden has written a very good novella indeed, a story to show that Science Fiction still has life in it. And we all stand on someone’s shoulders.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “And he and her had had rationalized” (he and she had rationalised.)  “The only way he knew … were the stars” (the only way … was the stars,) dove (dived,) “The chase to over too soon” (to be over too soon,) “in his own prophesy” (the noun is ‘prophecy’, prophesy is the verb,) “lay of the land” (it wasn’t a song; ‘lie of the land’,) “Berengas’ abacus beads” (several instances of Berengas’; Berengas’s,) prophesies (prophecies,) “calculations were only be done by” (‘were only done by’ or ‘were only to be done by’,) “he did recognized this” (recognise) “one of which were” (None of which was,) “Stratos’ face” (Stratos’s,) “taller than a few stories” (storeys, please,) “no sign anything resembling” (no sign of anything.) “Neither of them were in the first flush of youth” (Neither of them was in…,) “‘more advanced that I am’” (advanced than I am.) “ ‘It is semi-rigid inflatable boat’” (It is a semi-rigid inflatable boat,) “holding on edges” (holding onto edges,) “there would be hole there now” (there would be a hole there now.) In the “About the Author”; published in three months of each other” (published within three months of each other.)

This strange head is by Daniel Arsham. It’s called Unearthed Bronze Eroded Melpomene and from this angle looks like something out of Doctor Who:-

But is a more conventional head from the other side:-

HA_HA is by Brian Fell:-

This old deer shelter at Yorkshire Sculpture Park has now been converted by James Turrell to an Art piece:-

A square has been cut out from its roof allowing a view of the sky:-

A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir by Kimsooja:-

Sean Scully’s Wall Dale Cubed:-

47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)