A Son of the Rock

Science Fiction Magazine from Scotland, The New Curiosity Shop, 104 p.

Apart from the fiction, in this first issue of a new venture there is an interview with Charles Stross; Steve Green’s column Border Crossings¹ discusses two SF films made mostly in Glasgow over twenty years apart, Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch adapted from D G Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin; in SF Caledonia – John Buchan SF writer,² Paul Cockburn examines that writer’s SF credentials. Reviews³ discusses five books.

The fiction is varied in scope. Each story has its own one-page art work and a title page to itself. Internal illustrations accompany some others.
More fantasy than SF, The Three Stages of Atsushi⁴ by Larry Ivkovich is set in Japan in 1531. A woman whose son, Omasu, was swept away in a flood the year before petitions the God Amaterasu to bring him back to life. A strange man in odd armour appears with an entourage of samurai and helps her (in stages,) for Omasu has a destiny.
In Alex Barr’s very well written The Spiral Moon⁵ a woman astronaut whose mission has suffered a catastrophic failure sets out to circumnavigate the small planetoid she is on, eventually hallucinating as she succumbs to oxygen starvation.
Symbiosis⁶ by Colleen Anderson has another member of a doomed space mission, on a planet this time, trying to survive by going native. The story’s ending is fantastical rather than SF.
The protagonist of See You Later⁷ by M Luke McDonnell gets herself a set of AR lenses to match the ones her husband needed for work and finds the settings he uses for his something of a surprise.
In what is intended to be a humorous piece, but is far too over the top to be so, David Perlmutter’s The Brat and the Burly Qs⁸ gives us an alien superhero, who is part mechanical, flying to Mars to apprehend a wrongdoer whom it has sent to jail once already.
Approaching 43,000 Candles⁹ by Guy T Martland. Controlled by the Moon, time is switched off once a year, and British Lighthouses travel to attend a conference. At one of these, Voth, from the Isles of Scilly, overhears the Bishop Rock and two other Cornish Lighthouses planning a shut down so that the Bishop’s much needed maintenance will be expedited.
In Broken Glass by Joseph L Kellogg, Slide Stations allow travel between five parallel worlds. RedBrian envies the other Brians who all have their Pats as lifetime companions.
In TimeMachineStory¹⁰ by Richmond A Clements a man goes back (and forward) in time but the effects aren’t what he expected.
The extremely short, almost throwaway, Cleanup on Deck 7 by Claire Simpson features a new female crew member on a spaceship under attack seeking refuge in a cupboard with only solvents and bleach available to her as weapons.
Space¹¹ by John Buchan is one of Buchan’s Leithen stories where that gentleman relates to a companion on a deer shoot the tale of his acquaintance Hollond, who forms a theory that so-called empty space is full of “mathematical pandemonium” with “halls and alleys in Space shifting .. according to inexorable laws” and there are Presences within it.

Pedant’s corner:- ¹Good Friday isn’t – and never has been – a public holiday in Scotland, PBS’ (PBS’s,) embue (imbue,) ²Given in the contents as page 82, it’s actually page 80. ³Stross’ (Stross’s,) “for an entertaining a ‘management team for dummies’” (one indefinite article is enough,) “their alien mind set giving homo sapien the chance” (either homo sapiens or homo sapien) ⁴Written in USian, a missing start quote at the beginning of a paragraph, thusly (thusly??? What sort of a word is that?) ⁵CO2 (it’s CO₂.) ⁶While their normal prey is referred to as herbivores the planet’s top predators are described as cats. However they appear they would not be cats. They are alien. Ditto the so-called trees. “The night painted the blood a sinister substance” (substance? Colour surely?) “Keela tramped determinably” (?? Determinedly, I think.) ⁷Written in USian. ⁸Written in USian; on their own free will (of their own free will,) synthetic water (????) embarrasing (embarrassing,) said my peace (my piece that would be,) sat (seated; or sitting,) liquid mercury (even piping hot at normal atmospheric pressure it has no other option but to be liquid, it doesn’t boil till 357 ^oC) jail-after (jail after.) ⁹And anyways (a Scot – even if a lighthouse – would say anyway, not anyways,) “couldn’t see more that a few yards” (more than.) ¹⁰“there’ll be cure in the end” (a cure,) one sentence had two full stops at its end, Arch Duke Ferdinand (Archduke.) ¹¹caldron (cauldron,) “as keen is a keen sword” (as keen as; or, as keen as is,) Prescences (Presences,) Holland (always Hollond elsewhere,) a missing start quote when a piece of dialogue continues after a narrative interpolation, plus a missing end quote at its end, and another at the end of a paragraph where the next was not a continuation of speech.