More from the Vaughan bequest transfer (see last post.)

Fittingly, this one is of Edinburgh:-

The West Gate, Canterbury:-

Shipping:-

The Doge’s Palace and Piazetta:-

Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal:-

Bellinzone, Switzerland:-

Ostend Harbour:-

Plymouth:-

Every January the Scottish National Gallery in Princes Street, Edinburgh, displays its bequest of works by J M W Turner. The terms of the bequest by Henry Vaughan dictated that these works could only be shown in January in order to protect them from damage by light.

In 2025  there was a variation to this practice in that the Edinburgh Gallery swapped its collection with that of the National Gallery of Ireland.

The day we went there was a long queue to get in (in normal years there isn’t) but we did we get to see a lot of Turners new to us.

Clovelly Bay North Devon:-

Chatel Argent above Villeneuve:-

Beech tree:-

A river in the Campagne:-

Old Dover Harbour and Shakespeare’s Cliff:-

NewCon Press, 2023, 228 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 9.

This is the author’s first collection of stories, twenty-one in all, plus one poem. Sixteen of them were culled from appearances in a variety of outlets over the past ten years, five are making their first appearance in print. The contents range in genre over SF, fantasy, myth and horror, with stories sometimes crossing over their borders.

In general, literature deals largely with the themes of love, sex and death. Science Fiction tends to be more restrictive (love for example tends to be bypassed and sex for the most part avoided) but its signature feature is in making its metaphors literal. (The outstanding example of that here is the title story, about the bond between a daughter and her mother.) Fantasy, myth and horror act more as warnings and as stripped-down guides to human relationships.

In the first few stories here the theme of death seems to be a connecting thread but this does not then extend to the collection as a whole.

The poem, Icarus Dreams, opens proceedings and partly sets the tone by inviting Icarus to heed his father and rewrite his story. Smits is more than adequately equipped to provide new shapes to old tales. To that end there are herein updated treatments riffing on the Blackbeard and Theseus stories, while the Baba Yaga of Russian folklore meets an AI.

But the author has further strings to her bow. Elsewhere, moles on the skin are a marker of long, perhaps immortal, life, and carry the threat of incarceration to unravel their genetic secrets. We meet an AI repairman whose encounter with his charge becomes reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One story (not narrated by Dr Watson) features Sherlock Holmes, but only in a bystanding part as he asks his psychic investigator – and female – cousin to help him. We have tales where a psychological decline follows the break-up of a relationship which had settled into routine, the Green Man appears to rescue a ravaged future Britain, a woman inherits a bookshop with an unusual kind of ghost, AI/human hybrids question each other over their origins – and the nature of God. One story centres on the reliving of bottled memories. There is an African inspired SF/fantasy cross-over. A woman falls in love with her witness protection AI android bodyguard, another tells of the lengths she went to in an attempt to get pregnant, a brother and sister hatch a plot to rescue their twin siblings from VR addiction in a warehouse, a female painter who sells pictures under her brother’s name finds she cannot hide her expertise from J M W Turner (with whom she shares the same reverence for sunlight,) two people celebrate their involvement with the commercial start-up of nuclear fusion at Sellafield, a woman on the point of death remembers incidents from her life while subjectively traversing a fantastical purgatorial maze.

Their telling requires a comprehensive array of authorial registers and Smits handles them all well, with very few infelicities. She is a talent to watch.

Pedant’s corner:- Theseus’ (x 2, Theseus’s,) focussing (x 2, focusing,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech,  Holmes’ (x 2, Holmes’s, which appeared later,) shrunk (shrank,) focussed (x 3, focused,) sunk (sank,) Geena Davis’ (Davis’s,) “legs akimbo” (I doubt it. It’s extremely difficult to put your feet on your hips,) “and laid down again” (lay down again,) data used as a singular noun (that would be datum, data is plural,) Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) “the settings on each gamer’s capsule isn’t” (the settings … aren’t,)  “‘it’s okay to chop down all the forests and poison the soil.’?” (has that question mark in the wrong place. It ought to be where the full stop is,) “him and Kel had looked to the stars” (he and Kel,) James’ (x 3, James’s; annoyingly employed a few pages later.) “A trail of soapy bubbles stream after his fleeing form” (a trail streams.) Plus points, though, for using maw correctly as a stomach.