Luna Press, 2018, 139 p.

This is a collection of short stories with leanings towards fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m not sure why the ligature st and the one for ct which I cannot reproduce here have been employed on the front and back covers of this, unless it’s to hint at a certain strangeness within. Then there’s the determinedly lower case of the title and author’s name. A statement of some sort.

Orange Dogs is set in a prone-to-flood, global-warmed, environmentally degraded University city where the books have all gone, as has most technology. A man whose wife is on the point of giving birth (again) is haunted by the miscarried child he had to dispose of a year or so earlier. The Orange Dogs of the title are symbols of the end-times; huge swallowtail butterflies. (Their colours are actually yellow-brown with large blue spots.)

Little Red Drops plays with allusions to Little Red Riding Hood in its tale of a woman escaping to the Andalusian wilds to banish the memories of a faithless lover by using the ancient lore of blood for blood.

Told in sections titled 0001 to 0016 Black Isle tells how the engineered species designed by XenoLab, the company our narrator works for, are succumbing to a stranger disease. It evokes the landscape of the Beauly Firth very well.

Stones are a possible portal to other worlds from one where an exaggerated Iron Lady presides over a Great Britain divorced from external alliances and even from trade with the outside world. Narrator Raven belongs to a family who operate the Eye, a camera obscura surveilling the mining town of four vast Pit Heads extracting quartz, coal, ether.

In the less than two page long Love (Ghost) Story the narrator cannot shake off images of her dead lover to whom nothing can compare.

The Ravisher, The Thief sees a young woman called to render her language knowledge in service to her community. She – as do others of the priestly caste – has a mental link to a bird of prey.

Prefixed by Captain Oates’s supposed last words, Frozen Planet reframes Scott’s Antarctic Expedition as a blighted exploration of an alien planet – with added howling creature and either a hallucination or a portal to another world.

Marvels Do Not Oftimes Occur tells of how two kinds of vessel appeared in the sky over a central European city on April 5^th 1561, and burned the churches before vanishing again.

Kingfisher has echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper in its tracking of the relationship of a married woman with her husband in a world where birds have disappeared.

A Place for Wild Beasts. A woman is plagued by a deer devouring the plants in her city garden.

Pedant’s corner:- “a flock of geese” (this was ‘in the leaden sky’. It’s a skein of geese, then, [and on the ground it would be a ‘gaggle’,]) “the island formerly known as England” (global warming must have been really profound in order to make England an island,) lightening (lightning, twice spelt as such elsewhere.) “She cleaned the steam off the window” (not steam; condensation. Steam (or water vapour when it’s below 100 ^oC) is an invisible gas – though people do refer to the drops of water it forms when it condenses as ‘steam’,) drunk (drank,) “Black Isle” (x 10 or so; the area as always been known as ‘the Black Isle’, never just ‘Black Isle’,) “Bauly Firth” (x 6; Beauly Firth,) insects-eaters (insect eaters.) “There seems to be two main types” (There seem to be two.) Robins have a drop of God’s blood in its veins” (in their veins,) “what looks like different kinds” (what look like different kinds,) “outside of” (x 3, just ‘outside’; no ‘of’,) “a experimental dose” (an experimental dose,) “if what her stupid uncle thought she needed was a babysitter” (doesn’t require the ‘was’,) “oblivious of” (it’s ‘oblivious to’,) “imping the feathers’ of a hawk’s tale” (no need for an apostrophe at the end of ‘feathers’,) a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, “the prophesy” (prophecy,) “When the tall was made” (when the toll was made,) “save two: to wit : Goodwife Anna….” (save two, to wit: Goodwife Anna.) “What would he have made of it, I wonder.” (That is a question, so requires a question mark at the end.) “It was tuna season and each bar offered their personal take on how to prepare it” (each bar offered its personal take,) “how comforting was to fall into” (comforting it was to,) “was like a taking a draught” (no need for that first ‘a’,) “everyone seem to have difficult pregnancies” (seemed to have,) “they would let themselves been touched” (be touched,) “marinated in soy source” (sauce.) “I looked a Jonas” (at Jonas.) “I fell a moment of void there” (I felt a moment.) “I had never knew what to do with it” (either; ‘I never knew’, or, ‘I had never known’.) “I had taken a plastic bag to use it as a glove” (to use as a glove,) “although there were not fluff” (although they were not,) “but they seem to accumulate” (seemed to,) “when I notice a stain” (noticed,) “that reminded me to the liquid” (of the liquid,) “sat in the sofa” (on the sofa.) “I did not want any doctor too look” (to look,) “the dinning room” (dining room.) “I had tided them up” (tidied,) “they were not native to the local fauna” (???? ‘They were not native fauna’ is less unnatural.) “If she was going to learn something in the next few days, was the systematic way..” (in the next few days, it was.)

TTA Press

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam takes the editorial slot and reflects on how growing up queer (her word) revealed that adults knew as little as children about navigating the world and instilled her with all sorts of phobias. In Future Interrupted Andy Hedgecock reveals how certain formative reading/viewing experiences still colour his tastes. Nina Allan’s Time Pieces reflects by way of her own experience and Marian Womack’s debut collection Lost Objects on how the short story is still the best pathway for a writer to come into his or her own.

The fiction kicks off with Grey Halls¹ by Rachael Cupp where a future musician famous for, but himself dismissive of, his one big success, Grey Halls, travels back in time for inspiration.
Superbright² by Ryan Row is set in a world where superpowers are common. This story totally failed to capture my interest.
In Tumblebum³ by Darby Harn, New York is flooded and everything is controlled by a huge corporation named TAG. Tumblebum is hired to find the missing photographer daughter of a racehorse owning family.
A species of harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex quaesitor; or P.q. starts building sculptures- or are they temples? – in P. Q.⁴ by James Warner.
In Tim Major’s Throw Caution⁵ pseudo-crab lifeforms have been found on Mars. Their bodies contain diamonds. (Well, not really. They’re silicon based.) The story follows two prospectors searching outwith the normal areas.
So Easy⁶ by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is a post-apocalypse story. Well enough done but a bit inconsequential.
Paul Crenshaw’s Eyes⁷ has a young boy find a pair of disembodied eyes floating in the stream which runs by his house. They can still blink and so answer his questions thereby telling a tale of life, the universe and so on.

In Reviews Iain Hunter recommends the Jane Yolen edited Nebula Awards Showcase 2018 (rather confusingly featuring stories from 2016;) I am rather less enthusiastic about Paul Jessup’s Close Your Eyes; Duncan Lunan says Rob Boffard’s Adrift relocates the aeroplane movie to a tour shuttle from a habitat overlooking the Horsehead Nebula, Lawrence Osborn claims Revenant Gun, the last in Yoon Ha Lee’s trilogy which began with Ninefox Gambit is essential reading for military SF space opera or worldbuilding buffs (I still won’t be going near it;) Duncan Lawrie accepts Shattermoon by Dominic Dulley for what it is, fast-paced light reading; Andy Hedgecock lauds at least one entertaining and provocative story from an under celebrated master in The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanui by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio translated by Margaret Jull; Stephen Theaker⁸ likes Kameron Hurley’s fix-up Apocalypse Nix better than he did her God’s War trilogy and Andy Hedgecock returns to praise Juliet E McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir.

Pedant’s corner:- ¹Written in USian, “He was fortunate, then, to not have Osorio’s fan base” (not to have.) ²Written in USian; “experiments with which had given her son” (either experiments which had given her son, or, experiments with which she had given her son,) “He shined.” (He shone.) ³Written in USian. ⁴Written in USian, “atypical climactic conditions” (climatic.) ⁵“sand….sunk away” (sank,) shrunk (shrank.) ⁶Written in USian. ⁷Written in Usian. ⁸“her ramshackle team of misfits are pretty much always doomed to fail” (her team is always doomed to fail.)