Salt, 2023, 183 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 8.

Alice Thompson is a veteran of seven previous novels but as far as I’m aware none of them has been Science Fiction. Concerning as it does a voyage to another planet (or, strictly, to its moon) this book could hardly be described as anything else. Yet it is not a typical exemplar of modern SF. Unlike the brashness of the average space exploration story its tonal qualities are more reminiscent of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. Its epigraph, perhaps the most famous quotation from The Tempest, suggests the trajectory that will follow.

A prologue sets up the body of the text as a tale of lost memory. Artemis was the sole human returnee of her crew from their trip to Oneiros on the spaceship Chimera in a search for bacteria that could break down carbon dioxide to obviate global warming. Two dryads, hybrids of computing powers and cloned human DNA provided by anonymous donors, came back with her. Though she has none of Oneiros she is now setting down as a novel, Chimera, the memories she has of the trip.

This odyssey from a beleaguered world where – apart from “the IT elite, the governing body called the elITe” (who do not allow their children access to computers or smart phones) – all humans seem to be in thrall to “widespread automation and the internet of things” and “virtual reality had destroyed downtime and daydreaming” while “in many ways all human progress, except for AI, had stagnated,” is an incongruous endeavour. The crew seems mismatched and detached. Artemis tells us that in space humans are not allowed to dream; it is too unsettling for their daily work. Though she got on the trip more or less by subterfuge and has a slightly unbalanced mental history she is in charge of the medication to ensure this. “Pills suppress rapid eye movement.” Dryads record everything they see and hear. In their ever-lurking presence they come across like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey before David Bowman pulled its plugs.

Adding to the distancing effect odd things happen on board. Though it is cruising faster than the speed of light jolts affect the ship’s smooth passage. A dryad alters the temperature controls for no good reason. A bacterium appears on a microscope slide as if out of nowhere. Artemis starts to hear ringing bells. One of the crew, Ivan, disappears.

The oddnesses do not stop there. On Oneiros itself they land miles away from their destination and have to trek across a snowscape to reach the base built for them by automated fabricators. Artemis discovers there had been a previous research ship to the moon, the Siren, but Mission Control, personified in an AI named Cressida, lost contact with the crew and pilot dryads returned the ship. She begins to see shadows.

On a novelistic level the writing here is perfectly acceptable, though the book has flaws. Thompson brings attention to her use of quotations via asterisks and footnotes. That may be all very well in academic tracts but in a novel it distracts from the narrative. Oneiros is a tad too programmatically named. At times the information dumping could have been better integrated but there are also indications of a lack of familiarity with SF as a genre or with scientific processes. Stars are visible through Chimera’s windows even though it’s travelling faster than light. (I doubt light could be seen if it’s moving slower than any potential observer.) Before their trek across Oneiros, the crew take oxygen pills. (Just how are these supposed to work?)

The novel’s central concerns are the relationship between humans and dryads and the nature of consciousness – which Ivan opines may be a fundamental property of matter. The crew’s fate and that of Artemis are bound up with the absence of dreams. How does their loss affect people, how does their lack impact on the dryads?

An Epilogue describes Artemis’s novel’s fate and may be commenting on Artemis’s reliability as a narrator.

Chimera is a solid, very readable piece of work but in drawing comparison to Lem and Lindsay is setting a high bar.

Pedant’s corner:- “She turned to the dryad.’ Why?’” (She turned to the dryad. ‘Why?) “Just logarithms and data” (this was about a dryad. ‘Just algorithms and data’ makes more sense,) bacteria (used as if its singular. Occasionally the proper singular ‘bacterium’ pops up,) focussed (focused.) “our brains our designed to look for connections” (Our brains are designed to.) “There was always had a book of poetry” (no need for the ‘had’,) two sentences couched as questions but lacking their question mark. “Cressida gave him a disarming smile” (gave her,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech, “she could make out, through the blizzard, snow that covered the entire surface of the moon, with abnormally high mountains in the distance” (a blizzard tends to obscure anything more than a few metres away,) “minus 40 centigrade” (the official designation for that temperature scale is Celsius.) “‘Check for cuts. Frostbite can get in’” (Cold can get in [though it’s actually heat being lost] and then frostbite might develop.) “Their strength and stamina was formidable” (the ‘and’ makes this plural; ‘were formidable’,) “outside of it” (outside it.) “A empty wardrobe” (An empty.) “His brain was wired different” (differently.) Technicolour (I believe it was spelled Technicolor,) “like an idea struck the flat previous” (I haven’t a clue what this is supposed to mean,) “refraction of protons” (this was about light; refraction of photons, then,) “of this moon ?” (the space between moon and the ‘?’ was there to distribute the words in the line evenly but it looked odd.)

I did not include this photo of the main information board at Edzell Castle in my first post about it so here it is now:-

Nor this one for the walled garden:-

This board in the visitor centre exhibition is about the then laird of Edzell Castle, David Lindsay, being a signatory of the National Address which put in motion the sequence of events which led to the Darien Disaster, Scotland’s ill-fated attempt to set up a colony in what is now Panama:-

British Library, 2019, 220 p, including a v p Introduction by Timothy C Baker, and Wild September a vi p article by MacPherson. First published in 1936. Reviewed for Interzone 290-291, Summer 2021.

In the mid- to late twentieth century Science Fiction by Scottish authors was all but invisible. Only four names spring to mind as being much in evidence at the time; J T McIntosh (who did though manage to publish over 20 SF novels,) Angus McVicar – whose output was aimed at YA readers (such books were called juvenile at the time) – and a reprint in the early 1960s of David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which despite its impeccably Science-Fictional title was arguably more of a fantasy than SF as such. Alasdair Gray produced his monumental Lanark in 1981 but that was such a unique novel (or four novels) that it hardly represented a trend or a model practicable to aspire to. And again it leaned towards fantasy, though some of his short stories were more recognisably SF. A tendency towards fantasy and horror in Scottish fiction had always been present – taking in George MacDonald’s Lilith etc and some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories (notably of course The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) – as was the tale of the supernatural or, at least, encounters with the devil, whose origins go back even further than Victorian times. Forty to fifty years ago though, of evidence of SF either in that present or from earlier decades, there was barely a trace, neither as reprints nor on library shelves. Not until Polygon’s republishing of the novels of Lewis Grassic Gibbon – some of them published originally under his real name of J Leslie Mitchell – did I become aware that there had indeed been a Scottish tradition of writing SF before the appearance of Iain (M) Banks. Ken Macleod swiftly followed him. That dam having been broken by their success in the field, there are as of now a fair few Scots active in the genre.

With Ian Macpherson’s Wild Harbour, the British Library, whose new editions of British Crime Classics from the 1930s have brightened up bookshop shelves with vibrant Art Deco style covers redolent of the railway posters of that decade, has pulled another long languishing work of Scottish Science Fiction out of obscurity.

The book was written in the shadow of the looming Second World War. In it, something has happened in Europe and war has been declared, exactly what and between whom is unspecified. The novel starts sometime after with protagonist Hugh and his wife Terry being woken up in the middle of the night by the sound (and sight) of gunfire in the distance, towards Inverness. It soon becomes obvious they are taking refuge in a cave – the text goes on to lay out how well they had customised it to the requirements of living in the wild – as an escape and hiding place from the outside world. Hugh had had no inclination to fight in a war, had refused to follow the instructions of his call-up papers and the pair made off into the country to fend for themselves. Despite his aversion to war Hugh nevertheless has to kill animals to survive, hunting deer, fishing, snaring the odd rabbit.

The text takes the form of diary entries by Hugh with chapter titles which usually consist only of dates (from 15 May 1944 – 11 October) except for the final one, Night. Oddly, despite numerous mentions of salting of deer for the winter, when October comes we are told they have run out of meat.

In an observation on modern humans’ capacity to get by unaided that has even more relevance these days Hugh remembers an acquaintance from before the war telling him, “Our senses are blunted. We depend on a multitude of people to make our clothes and food and tools for us. We have noses that can’t smell, ears that are deaf -”

The pair’s struggle to survive and maintain their seclusion is threatened by human intruders into their surroundings, intruders whose shadowy nature and motivations only heighten the sense of threat. In this context Wild Harbour prefigures British SF’s “cosy” catastrophes of the 1950s.

The Introduction tells us, “Place is formative in all Macpherson’s novels, but the human relationship with place is never an easy one.” That is a statement that could be made about the Scottish novel in general. Another Scottish novelistic trait displayed here is a close attention to depiction of the land.

The writing is of its time, though, and the feel very reminiscent of Gibbon’s slightly earlier SF novels Three Go Back and Gay Hunter, both of which involve sojourns in almost deserted countryside, but also of John Buchan’s John Macnab, (plus there is the merest whiff of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.) Macpherson, however, has an absurd overfondness for the phrase “commenced to” and from the perspective of over 80 years after publication it is noticeable that Terry’s contribution to the pair’s survival is confined almost entirely to the domestic sphere, within the cave.

In valediction, Macpherson offers us the thought that, “We are victors over fate when we choose well, though it destroy us.”

A subsequent article by Macpherson, entitled Wild September, which was published in September 1940, rounds off this edition, and in it he reflects on the actual war which started in 1939.

As Science Fiction, though, Wild Harbour on balance falls down. Its background is too sketchy and there is no real necessity for such a story to be placed in a putative future (except for the international situation at the time it was written.) It could as easily have been a present-day narrative with a more mundane reason than dodging conscription for escaping to the hills. However, that might be argued to be an unwarranted criticism as it projects twenty-first century ideas onto an older text and a work of SF is always about the time it was written, never the future. As a historical curiosity and a reminder that SF by Scottish writers has an extended history Wild Harbour is welcome. Modern SF readers, though, might prefer more meat on its bones.

Pedant’s corner:- in the Introduction; “depictions of violence in books bears little relation to” (depictions …. bear little relationship to.) Elsewhere; a lower case letter at the start of a sentence after a question mark at the end of the previous one, ditto after an exclamation mark, digged (dug,) “‘there didn’t use to be’” (used to be,) a switch of tense from past to present then back, “where I sunk his rifle” (where I had sunk his rifle,)

In this issue there is an interview with Dee Raspin winning author of Shoreline of Infinity’s Story Competition for readers (from issue 1.) In SF Caledonia¹, Monica Burns looks at the work of David Lindsay, especially A Voyage to Arcturus. Reviews² gave a thumbs-up to five of the six novels considered. MultiVerse³ has two poems apiece from Jane Yolen and Marge Simon. Parabolic Puzzles⁴ asks how many aliens and fingers there are in a bar full of them.

In the fiction:-
Time for Tea⁵ by J K Fulton features an embedded 1.0 human-equivalent AI coming back to consciousness after over 3,000 years to find everything has changed but its Imperatives. Since it’s a kettle, those are to make tea.
The Slipping⁶ by Miriam Johnson. A new personality takes over a body from inside then sloughs off the old covering.
Lacewing⁷ by Edd Vick is a one-pager where two lovers have all of time and space at their fingertips. In the Jurassic they see and name a butterfly.
In Into the Head, Into the Heart⁸ by Thomas Broderick, a bar that successfully banned all modern technology has started to decline when a young inventor brings in a machine that will give people the nostalgic experience they want. Business booms, but the response of the inventor when the machine’s flaws are revealed is, to my mind, almost the opposite of what would be likely from the type.
It’s Been a Long Day by Tracey S Rosenberg. Lindia has foreknowledge of the deaths of people she meets. Her attempts to prevent that of newscaster Balcan Dobbs fail in a way she hasn’t foreseen.
We Have Magnetic Trees by Ian Hunter is narrated from the points of view of former sheep farmers who have tried everything to make a success and yielded to WEErd Wonders products genetically modified to withstand constant downpour. They worry it’s the thin end of the wedge. Notable for the use of the Scots word gubbed.
Pigeon⁹ by Guy Stewart conflates a real Wellsian time traveller with a past USA in which the passenger pigeon was not wiped out.
*The Great Golden Fish¹⁰ by Dee Raspin sees a widowed crofter from the time of the Highland Clearances rescued from his plight by a giant robotic golden fish.
The Beachcomber¹¹ by Mark Toner is a graphic story using the ploy of an interplanetary beachcomber to enable a retelling of part of E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s The Skylark of Space (which on this evidence must have been the most godawful tosh. I may have read it as a boy but if so I’ve blanked it out.)
Extract from A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. Chapter Six in its entirety. This seems no less odd now than did the whole book when I read it in the long ago.

Pedant’s corner:- ¹A in the Editor’s introduction an “of” is missing. ² “her heavy modifications…. puts” (put,) “on the way to a hanger in Texas” (a hanger? A hangar is more likely,) a list of “what is”es none of which has a question mark after it, the Dettman’s (Dettmans; it was plural.) ³two lovers (lovers,) “with it fierce seers” (its.) ⁴“A gaggle … were” (a gaggle was,) “from the dangers gravitational waves (of gravitational waves.) ⁵“Their qualia, their subjectiveness, has gone” (OK subjectiveness is singular, qualia isn’t; but “their subjectiveness” was parenthetical: so, have gone,) “not what I remember dogs and rabbits to look like” (not what I remember dogs and rabbits looked like would be more natural but the narrator is an AI.) ⁶Written in USian – though curiously “manoeuvre” is rendered the British way, “I don’t know if he thought he could reverse it?” (is not a question,) “pulled handkerchief out” (a handkerchief,) too many instances of “time interval” later, “a multi-national cooperation” (reads oddly but this is SF, could be a portmanteau word formed from corporation and cooperative,) “I may have lost it” (might have.) ⁷Written in USian. ⁸Also written in USian, mat black (matt), “finally talking a look around” (taking.) ⁹Written in USian, H G Wells’ (Wells’s.) ¹⁰fit (fitted.) ¹¹One speech bubble carries the phrase “46.72 light-centuries right?” as a calculation of distance from Earth, the next has a “character” say “We’re nearly five thousand light-years from Earth.” To compound this, then is added “and getting further at a rate of about one light-year per minute.” !!!!

Canongate Pocket Classics, 2001, 159 p

The book is diminutive in size (16 cm tall, 11 wide) but not content. It rattles through the history of writing in and by Scots from Anglo-Saxon times till the early 20^th century. It focuses on what Gray – and most other commentators – consider to be the best in the tradition; hence classic in the book’s title. More recent Scottish writing is deliberately excluded as being too close for a proper perspective.

Several of the works mentioned in the survey were of course overlooked or even derided on first publication and it is only with time their merits have come to be recognised. Overall, though, the literary output from this small nation is shown fit to stand comparison with any.

Throughout the 1950s, the early 1960s, through the late 60s efflorescence of the New Wave and into the 1970s and 80s a stream of English authors came to prominence in the SF field and had novels published in Britain. To my mind there was a clear distinction in the type of books all these authors were producing compared to those emanating from across the Atlantic and that certain characteristics distinguished the work emanating from either of these publication areas. While Bob Shaw was a notable Northern Irish proponent of the form during this period and Christopher Evans flew the flag for Wales from 1980 something kept nagging at me as I felt the compulsion to begin writing. Where, in all of this, were the Scottish writers of SF? And would Scottish authors produce a different kind of SF again?

Until Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas, 1987, contemporary Science Fiction by a Scottish author was so scarce as to be invisible. It sometimes seemed that none was being published. As far as Scottish contribution to the field went in this period only Chris Boyce, who was joint winner of a Sunday Times SF competition and released a couple of SF novels on the back of that achievement, Angus McAllister, who produced the misunderstood The Krugg Syndrome and the excellent but not SF The Canongate Strangler plus the much underrated Graham Dunstan Martin offered any profile at all but none of them could be described as prominent. And their works tended to be overlooked by the wider SF world.

There was, certainly, the success of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981 but that novel was more firmly in the Scottish tradition of fantasy and/or the supernatural rather than SF (cf David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus, 1920) and was in any case so much of a tour de force that it hardly seemed possible to emulate it; or even touch its foothills.

David Pringle noted the dearth of Scottish SF writers in his introduction to the anthology Nova Scotia where he argued that the seeming absence of Scottish SF authors was effectively an illusion. They were being published, only not in the UK. They (or their parents) had all emigrated to America. Though he has since partly resiled on that argument, it does of course invite the question. Why did this not happen to English SF writers?

It was in this relatively unpromising scenario that I conceived the utterly bizarre notion of writing not just Science Fiction but Scottish Science Fiction and in particular started to construct an SF novel that could only have been written by a Scot. Other novels may have been set in Scotland or displayed Scottish sensibilities but as far as I know I’m the only person who deliberately set out to write a novel of Scottish SF.

It could of course simply be that there was so little SF from Scotland being published because hardly anyone Scottish was writing SF or submitting it to publishers. But there were undoubtedly aspirants; to which this lack of role models might have been an off-putting factor. I myself was dubious about submitting to English publishers as they might not be wholly in tune with SF written from a Scottish perspective. I also thought Scottish publishers, apparently absorbed with urban grittiness, would look on it askance. I may have been completely wrong in these assumptions but I think them understandable given the circumstances. There is still no Scottish publisher of speculative fiction.

With Iain M Banks and Consider Phlebas the game changed. Suddenly there was a high profile Scottish SF writer; suddenly the barrier was not so daunting. And Phlebas was Space Opera, the sort of thing I was used to reading in American SF, albeit Banks had a take on it far removed from right wing puffery of the sort most Americans produced. Phlebas was also distant from most English SF – a significant proportion of which was seemingly fixated with either J G Ballard or Michael Moorcock or else communing with nature, and in general seemed reluctant to cleave the paper light years. Moreover, Banks sold SF books by the bucketload.

There was, though, the caveat that he had been published in the mainstream first and was something of a succès de scandale. (Or hype – they can both work.)

[There is, by the way, an argument to be had that all of Banks’s fiction could be classified as genre: whether the genre be SF, thriller, in the Scottish sentimental tradition, or even all three at once. It is also arguable that Banks made Space Opera viable once more for any British SF writer. Stephen Baxter’s, Peter Hamilton’s and Alastair Reynolds’s novel debuts post-date 1987.]

As luck would have it the inestimable David Garnett soon began to make encouraging noises about the short stories I was sending him, hoping to get into, at first Zenith, and then New Worlds.

I finally fully clicked with him when I sent The Face Of The Waters, whose manuscript he red-penned everywhere. By doing that, though, he nevertheless turned me into a writer overnight and the much longer rewrite was immeasurably improved. (He didn’t need to sound quite so surprised that I’d made a good job of it, though.)

That one was straightforward SF which could have been written by anyone. Next, though, he accepted This Is The Road (even if he asked me to change its title rather than use the one I had chosen) which was thematically Scottish. I also managed to sneak Closing Time into the pages of the David Pringle edited Interzone – after the most grudging acceptance letter I’ve ever had. That one was set in Glasgow though the location was not germane to the plot. The idea was to alternate Scottish SF stories with ones not so specific but that soon petered out.

The novel I had embarked on was of course A Son Of The Rock and it was David Garnett who put me in touch with Orbit. On the basis of the first half of it they showed interest.

Six months on, at the first Glasgow Worldcon,* 1995, Ken MacLeod’s Star Fraction appeared. Another Scottish SF writer. More Space Opera with a non right wing slant. A month or so later I finally finished A Son Of The Rock, sent it off and crossed my fingers. It was published eighteen months afterwards.

I think I succeeded in my aim. The Northern Irish author Ian McDonald (whose first novel Desolation Road appeared in 1988) in any case blurbed it as “a rara avis, a truly Scottish SF novel” and there is a sense in which A Son Of The Rock was actually a State Of Scotland novel disguised as SF.

Unfortunately the editor who accepted it (a man who, while English, bears the impeccably Scottish sounding name of Colin Murray) moved on and his successor wasn’t so sympathetic to my next effort – even if Who Changes Not isn’t Scottish SF in the same uncompromising way. It is only Scottish obliquely.

So; is there now a distinctive beast that can be described as Scottish Science Fiction? With the recent emergence of a wheen of Scottish writers in the speculative field there may at last be a critical mass which allows a judgement.

Banks’s Culture novels can be seen as set in a socialist utopia. Ken MacLeod has explicitly explored left wing perspectives in his SF and, moreover, used Scotland as a setting. Hal Duncan has encompassed – even transcended – all the genres of the fantastic in the two volumes of The Book Of All Hours, Alan Campbell constructed a dark fantastical nightmare of a world in The Deepgate Codex books. Gary Gibson says he writes fiction pure and simple and admits of no national characteristics to his work – but it is Space Opera – while Mike Cobley is no Scot Nat (even if The Seeds Of Earth does have “Scots in Spa-a-a-ce.”)

My answer?

Probably not, even though putative practitioners are more numerous now – especially if we include fantasy. For these are separate writers doing their separate things. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether they have over-arching themes or are in any way comparable.

PS. Curiously, on the Fantastic Fiction website, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds are flagged as British – as are Bob Shaw, Ian McDonald, Christopher Evans and Mike Cobley – while all the other Scottish authors I’ve mentioned are labelled “Scotland.” I don’t know what this information is trying to tell us.

*For anyone who hasn’t met the term, Science Fiction Conventions are known colloquially as Cons. There are loads of these every year, most pretty small and some quite specialised. The Worldcon is the most important, an annual SF convention with attendees from all over the globe. It’s usually held in the US but has been in Britain thrice (Glasgow 2, Brighton 1) and once in Japan, to my knowledge. The big annual British SF convention is known as Eastercon because it takes place over the Easter weekend.

Edited to add (6/6/2014):- Margaret Elphinstone should be added to the list above of Scottish authors of SF. Her first SF book The Incomer appeared from the Women’s Press in 1987, the same year as Consider Phlebas, but I missed out on it then. My review is here.
See also my Scottish SF update.

Edited again to add (4/4/18) Elphinstone’s sequel to The Incomer is A Sparrow’s Flight which I reviewed here.