A Son of the Rock

TTA Press, 96 p

Georgina Bruce’s Editorial calls for SF to resist celebrating the beautiful apocalypse and instead to imagine something better. Andy Hedgecock’s Future Interrupted muses on the Golden Age future that didn’t happen and the present day world of work and its intersection with the “stultifying timidity” of business, academia and politics. In Climbing Stories Aliya Whiteley^a contemplates stupid questions, obvious questions, the unanswerable Why? and the attempts of film, theatre and fiction to answer it – or not. In Book Zone John Howard^b welcomes the “directly and compellingly told” reprints of all-but forgotten 1950s and 1960s writer Charles Eric Maine’s far from cosy catastrophe novels The Tide Went Out and The Darkest of Nights, Duncan Lunan finds A Brilliant Void: a selection of classic Irish Science Fiction novels edited by Jack Fennell a book for the literary historian rather than the SF enthusiast and Temi Oh’s generation starship novel Do You Dream of Terra-Two? not entirely convincing, Ian Hunter lauds Tim Major’s science fantasy Snakeskins as better than good, where good equates to “stays with you”, Stephen Theaker feels the anthology New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl is a missed opportunity to trawl a wider writers’ pool than the editor’s acquaintances, Barbara Melville “cannot fault” the “seamless, gripping and immersive” The Record Keeper by Agnes Gomillion, the best she has ever read for Interzone, Maureen Kincaid Speller says Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan, partly a thought experiment on what happens if the plug is pulled on the internet, is a novel that has been well worth the wait, while finally Andy Hedgecock reviews Georgina Bruce’s “eminently impressive” debut collection This House of Wounds and interviews the author.
In the fiction:
The Realitarians by James Warner¹ features, as well as a woman inveigled into luring a physicist to a hotel in Paris, a couple of talking cats. Apart from the cats there is little to this that reads as SF or Fantasy.
In Float by Kai Hudson² a young woman exiled back to Earth from a space colony struggles with high gravity and the plethora of water.
Harmony by Andy Dudak³ is set in a totalitarian world where the regime uses song as a means of control. A foreign agent tries to resist its siren call.
The city of A Dreamer Arrives in the Occupied City by Malcolm Devlin⁴ is occupied by lopers who steal dreams, have imposed a curfew and keep the populace subjugated by means of a drug called kurshi. Felicia Fortuna suffered an accident in her youth and so still dreams. She sings her dreams in a nightclub.
The longest story, Scolex by Matt Thomson⁵, features a drug mule used to smuggling contraband in his blood, who has been given the Scolex of the title, a substance which alters DNA.
The very short Café Corona by Georgina Bruce is illustrated by a background of the recent photograph of the event horizon of a black hole. A woman sits in a café and ponders the malleability of the world, the resemblances between things.
In Our Fathers Find Their Graves in our Shortest Memories by Rebecca Campbell⁶, the Ossuary, a vast digital database of human images and messages, a repository of human memory, counts down the dwindling number of humans still alive.

Pedant’s corner:- ^a“to not answer” (not to answer.) ^b“even if his handling of some of the scientific aspects were not always so sure” (his handling … was not always,) focussing (focusing.) ¹Written in USian. ²snuck (sneaked.) ³Written in USian; staunch (stanch.) ⁴crenelated (crenellated,) “the cream of the city’s middle class were slumming it” (the cream …was slumming it,) “their audience are allowed to dismiss what they say” (their audience is allowed to.) ⁵“A group of office workers jostle him” (a group jostles.) ⁶Written in USian, “the species’” (species, singular, so species’s.)