NewCon Press, 2022, 331 p.

Billy Braid has been brought up in the Moulspur backwoods, apprenticed to Handmaster Benoit Kim. Kim is able to fashion from the local wood a type of animated treeperson known as a sylvan. (Other creatures can be made too.) The sylvans can speak to Billy in a sybillant tone. One day they warn him of the approach of a stranger. This is Bullivant Smout, a kind of larger than life, cartoonish braggart like something out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He carries a message to Kim from Karpentine, the city Kim had fled before coming to the Moulspurs. The message asks for a sample of his work to be sent back to the city. Despite Billy’s objections Kim has no choice. The message has been written in compellant ink. Kim entrusts Billy with the task of conveying the sylvan, named Seldom, with the instructions: go straight there under your own steam; avoid talking to people; don’t accept gifts; come straight back.

Life, not to mention fiction, is of course more complicated than that. Even before reaching the city Billy has encountered the slightly roguish Ralston Maundy, who agrees to look after Billy’s package while he enters the Tower of Hands to make the expected contribution, and then a woman who asks him to help fix her weird contraption before taking him up into the clouds. For she, Paraphernalia Loess, is of the Weathermakers Guild and the rain is not behaving itself, creating drought in parts of the country from which refugees have descended on Karpentine. Billy is startled to find the clouds are also full of voices, which although inarticulate as yet are more malevolent than sylvans. Paraphernalia turns out to be the daughter of Jelena Loess, Queen of Clouds, though by the end of the book deserves that accolade herself.

Karpentine is a hierarchical place run by the Guilds; Artificers; Printmakers; Constructors; Inkmasters etc. The city itself is also stratified by class, from the lower levels to the upper. Billy soon runs foul of the law (machines have been banished from this world and sylvans seem to be just that. Motes left over from the destruction of the machines are what produce the sentience in sylvans and the clouds.) He is imprisoned in the Institute of Improvement, basically a forced labour establishment whose inmates are helpless due to the compellant ink used to ensure their compliance. Billy’s abilities have been noticed by the Guilds though, and he is released to the Loesses after a bidding war. He is not, as the Law of Man commands, ‘Rightly Bound by the Limits of his Humanity.’ Due to his training, he can fashion wood to some extent but, later, his capacity to manipulate paper becomes more important.

Though Paraphernalia takes him under her wing he is still a servant, but she is almost as constrained as he is, frustrated by the looming necessity to make a marriage alliance to aid her family. For the Weathermakers’ stock is falling. Paraphernalia and Billy gradually from a mutually appreciative alliance.

Though there are several strands, the main plot revolves around the Guilds’ desire for carbon black made from the charred wood of sylvans, as it is believed that will have even stronger compellant properties, and Billy’s desire to protect the sylvans from harm.

Apart from the resourceful Paraphernalia and Billy himself, Queen of Clouds is replete with variously memorable characters; the twin enforcers, Innocent and Erudite Bello, Maundy’s nephew and niece Vern and Clymie, the needy Killick Roach, the haughty Stillworth Crane, the spider-like Moraine Otterbree, the slippery sisters Sin and Skin, and, despite being caught up in the fantastical scenario which surrounds them, even the minor characters here are well drawn and totally believeable.

There are also pleasing Scottish grace notes – a publisher called Blackie, the words skelped and skelfs, Billy being addressed as ‘son’.

This is emphatically not the standard mediævally based fantasy world. It is agreeably complex, well thought through, and despite its repugnant aspects (which world does not have those, and fiction would not be compelling without them,) engaging.

In our present world of communication silos it also acts as a warning to question what you read.

Pedant’s corner:-  “What echoed across the moor were brash caws and clacks” (What echoed … was …) “Whatever sense of adventure Billy had evaporated” (Whatever sense of adventure Billy had, had evaporated.) “He made that the wish that would drive him forward” (He made a wish that … ???) “What surprised him, were the crowds” (no comma; and, perhaps, ‘What surprised him was the crowds.’ If the sentence was turned round I think it’s natural to say, ‘It was the crowds that surprised him.’)  “the only family you need us the one” (is the one,) “that led his and Maundy’s rooms” (that led to his and,) ‘“What’s going?”’ (‘What’s going on?’) “‘Never mind, I already know?’” (is not a question,) “The valuable supply of Noteworth, Kim had used” (no comma needed,) “rather patronisingly, named Diligence Way” (no need for the comma,) benefactor (benefactress?) “The hoi polloi” (Common usage I know, but, strictly, hoi means ‘the’ so the ‘the’ before polloi is unnecessary,) Kinglsey (Kingsley,) “that even these Artificers” (even if these Artificers.) “What little he could see of the courtyards below the nest of roof ridges were in late afternoon shadow”  (What little he could see of the courtyards …. was in late afternoon shadow.)  “Who knew another attempt would” (Who knew if/whether another attempt would,) “in which the aerialists and horsemasters performed their shows in at the Canza fair” (only one ‘in’ needed,) “about emotionally attachments” (emotional attachments,) “‘All the way round to the low for’”  (the low for?) “but she had she didn’t let on” (but if she had she didn’t let on,) an unindented new paragraph, “while she guide it up” (guided it up.) “The base of it, all but touching the Weathermakers’ tower” (no comma needed,) “went meet the governor” (went to meet,) a missing quotation mark as a piece of direct speech is resumed, “Billy suddenly had shocking , vivid image” (had a shocking, vivid,)  “both inside and outside of his head” (doesn’t need the ‘of’,) “the destruction of refugee camp” (of the refugee camp,) “Alicia’s sniffed haughtily” (Alicia sniffed,)  “but he they should have been” (no ‘he’,) “many years in from now” (no ‘in’ needed,) focussed (as I recall this appeared on other pages too but usually had ‘focused’.) “Para got up from settee” (from the settee,) “to the anguish of city” (of the city,) “inside of” (inside,) dumfounded (dumbfounded,) “a ramp that down from the central room” (that led down from,) a missing full stop after ‘sums’,) “‘What the Institutionalised?’” (‘What about the Institutionalised?’) crenelated (crenellated.) “Then their threats changed then to” (only one ‘then’ needed,) “but in then he heard” (but then he heard.) “He right of course” (He was right of course,) “and the reeked of booze” (and he reeked of,) “and that the hallway a mess” (and the hallway a mess,) “a turn in the stairs. The hush of the house forcing him to whisper.” (a turn in the stairs, the hush of the house …,)  “birth right” (birthright.) “Roach’s said thickly” (looks a bit odd. ‘Roach said thickly’???)  phlemy (phlegmy,) “not be depended on have scruples” (be depended on to have,) Vern (needs a full stop,) “‘You have allow us’” (You have to allow us’,)  “And that was the ones who” (And those were the ones who”,) “The only signs  that the pair were still alive was their breathing” (The only sign that,)  “staunch the blood” (stanch the blood,) “done something disappear to, something to change her in body” (I can’t decipher something disappear to,)  “‘to compliment your inks’” (complement.) “‘Stick him in there too,’ he can give her a hand.’” (‘Stick him in there too, he can give her a hand’,)  “looked to on the verge of collapse” (looked to be on the verge.)

I also noticed indentureship. I’ve always considered indentiture as the noun for this condition but I can’t find a reference for it. It may just have been indenture.

At the weekend I was away again, this time in Glasgow for the Satellite 5 Science Fiction Convention.

I met up with a few old friends from the Scottish SF scene, was a member of a panel on the subject of Writing Space – How do SF writers an­d artist­s make their fu­tur­istic tech­nology be­liev­able? And does it really mat­ter i­f they don’t? (I don’t think I made an idiot of myself.)

I was also introduced briefly to the editor of Shoreline of Infinity, a new SF magazine/ezine and a potential home for stories.

Not to mention buying a copy of Neil Williamson’s latest story collection Secret Language published by NewCon Press, so hot off the presses it hasn’t been officially released yet.

And that nice man Ian Whates, publisher at NewCon, gave me a copy of his Pelquin’s Comet as his thank you for doing the proof-reading on it.

In Nostalgia by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam the nostalgia of the title is a drug that takes you back to earlier times. This may not always be a good idea.
T R Napper’s An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extraterrestrial Betting Markets features a mathematical prodigy imagining creating bets about his behaviour on a market for extraterrestrials. He is surprised when an alien turns up to collect. (He has neglected to take his medication, though.)
The Ferry Man by Pandora Hope¹ is inspired by one of the byways of Norse mythology. A ferry captain has the power to reverse the usual attraction of a siren for the unwary.
In Tribute by Christien Gholson² a mysterious creature is puzzled by why others bring some of their kind to his world to die. While it is a different story entirely, I noticed (of course, I would) that this has some tonal and descriptive similarities to Dusk, the story of mine that appeared in Nova Scotia.
Fish on Friday by Neil Williamson is an amuse bouche set out as a transcript of a phone call from a state apparatchik in an independent Scotland to a Ms MacArthur who is something of a refusenik of the benefits, dietary and otherwise, of the regime.

Pedant’s corner:-
¹ Pandora Hope sounds very pseudonymous to me.
² Can anyone else not see this? (Can no-one else see this?) Kaayam (Kaayem.)

This year’s nominees for the BSFA Awards have been announced.

As far as the fiction is concerned we have the unusually high total of eight novels on the ballot form, of which I have read three*. (Edited to add: so far.)

The Race* by Nina Allan (NewCon Press)
Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson (Solaris)
Wolves by Simon Ings (Gollancz)
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August* by Claire North (Orbit)
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder)
The Moon King* by Neil Williamson (NewCon Press)

The short fiction has only three contenders – all of whom are women it seems; for the second year in a row. I have read none of them as yet (but hope the BSFA will produce the usual booklet.) Though it’s totally irrelevant I was on a panel at last year’s Eastercon with Ruth Booth.

The Honey Trap by Ruth EJ Booth (La Femme, Newcon Press)
The Mussel Eater by Octavia Cade (The Book Smugglers)
Scale Bright by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Immersion Press)

The ones that stick in my mind most – for whatever reason – are:-

Signs of Life by M John Harrison
Mr Mee by Andrew Crumey
Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald
The Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner
A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon – but in especial Sunset Song
The Moon King by Neil Williamson
The Dogs and the Wolves by Irène Némirovsky
The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani
HHhH by Laurent Binet
That Summer by Andrew Greig
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Way to Go by Alan Spence

Four SF/Fantasy novels, six Scottish ones (eight if the trilogy is separated) and no less than five translated works.

The Posset Pot by Neil Williamson¹
Possibly the unexpected results of a Large Hadron Collider type experiment, bubbles from elsewhere or elsewhen are intersecting the Earth, excising parts of it when they disappear. The narrator navigates the ruins of Glasgow, looking for provisions, hoping for the chance to be reunited with the lover he lost to one of the bubbles years before. An unusual apocalypse this, made more so by the familiarity (to me) of its setting.

The Mortuaries by Katharine E K Duckett²
Another apocalypse, this one based on global warming. The remaining human population lives on a gloopy foodstuff named noot. The titular mortuaries are more like mausolea. A man called Brixton invented a process which could embalm bodies and keep them fresh. Viewpoint character Tem grows up not fully understanding the world around him until he visits the “bad” mortuary. The pieces of the story didn’t quite cohere. In this world of shortage would there still be enough resources for the upkeep of the mortuaries – not to mention cars and motorbikes for people to flee the doomed last coastal city?

Diving into the Wreck by Val Nolan³
A story about the discovery of the lost Apollo 11 lunar ascent module, Eagle, crashed somewhere on the Moon, and of the necessity for mystery. I wasn’t quite convinced by the (unnamed) narrator’s final decision but this is a fine tale of what it – sometimes – means to be human.

Two Truths and a Lie by Oliver Buckram⁴
This describes a doomed love affair – one of whose participants may be an alien – couched as a series of short paragraphs each followed by three propositions of which the story’s title and preamble invite us to believe only two are true.

A Brief Light by Claire Humphrey⁵
Ghosts are appearing in everyone’s houses. Ghosts which sometimes have the attributes of birds. This causes complications in the marriage of Lauren who is contemplating a lesbian affair with Jo. The ghosts interfere in both their lives.

Sleepers by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam⁶
Strange white creatures with hooves have started to appear randomly. An insomniac woman whose father is in hospital seeks one out to see if it perhaps a version of him. While the present tense narration is perhaps justified by the ending it seemed to strike a false note in the second paragraph.

¹ sheered for sheared and “cookie jar.” Cookie jar? Unlikely from a Glaswegian I’d have thought.
² Written in USian
³ A wyne of hay may be a misprint for wayne. There was also the sentence, “Here so the long culmination of selenological time.” What????
⁴ I had to look up “s’mores.” It’s some sort of USian confection.
⁵ Ditto “toonie” – a Canadian two-dollar coin.
⁶ Written in USian

This issue arrived during the past week. It contains my review of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. The cover displayed in Interzone (and shown right) is a different one from the review copy I read.

In the issue too is an interview of and a story by member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle (and also my good mate) Neil Williamson.

Neil’s novel The Moon King (left) has also recently been published. I bought my copy at Eastercon. It’s high on my tbr pile.

I’ve now read four of the five short-listed novels – the first time I’ve ever managed such a feat before the vote. While it is so much easier to find books in these internet days I did make a conscious effort this time. My reviews of these five are in the previous post plus here, here and here. It’s probably the one I’ve missed (Zoo City by Lauren Beukes) that will win now.

The nominations for Best Art are to my mind profoundly uninspiring except perhaps the spaceship by Andy Bigwood on the cover of Conflicts.

As to the short stories: the BSFA booklet has been devoured and here are my thoughts.

Flying In The Face Of God by Nina Allan.

The Kushnev drain is a(n unexplained) treatment that allows deep space expeditions to be undertaken more easily. Viewpoint character Anita, a film-maker whose mother was murdered in an anti-space-exploration terrorist attack when she was months old, is in love with Rachel, a recipient of the Kushnev drain who is about to set off into space. Rachel’s boyfriend, Serge, has moved on already.

The Science Fiction in this story is peripheral, being only the mentions of the Kushnev drain and space travel. Apart from that it’s … well, nothing much really.

At the level of the writing, an apparent change of viewpoint character in paragraph 1 (and 2) brought me to a shuddering stop in paragraph 3. Throughout, there is a high degree of info dumping. Tenses within the flashbacks are not precise enough making keeping track of things difficult. Anita’s grandmother features for no good plot reason that I could see. None of the characters displays much psychological depth.

As a result I found this story to be a bit incoherent. And nothing happens.

The Shipmaker by Aliette De Bodard

In a Chinese dominated future culture the shipmaker of the title is in charge of designing a spaceship – on principles that appear to relate to or derive from feng shui. The ship is to be piloted by a flesh and electronic hybrid Mind, gestated in the womb of a volunteer, the mechanics of which process are not laid out. The birth-mother turns up early and throws the delicately balanced design process into confusion. The culture is sketched efficiently and the characters’ problems are believable enough.

This is a proper story with forward movement and motivated characters but with an ending that is perhaps too glib.

The Things by Peter Watts

This story is told from the point of view of an alien, who has always heretofore been able to meld with and assimilate to other lifeforms, and is capable of warding off entropy. The creature’s offshoots have survived a crash and are trying to come to communion with the human members of an Antarctic expedition who come to realise its presence and resist it. Its gradual understanding of the singular nature of human existence, that we have brains – which it regards as a form of cancer – that we die; is well handled.

Again, this is a story, but due to its nature the humans it depicts are never more than names. The alien, however, is as real as you could wish. The last sentence is a little intense, though, not to say unsavoury.

Arrhythmia by Neil Williamson

In a Britain which is reminiscent of the early- to mid-20th century with concomitant working practices and social attitudes yet still has room for Top Of The Pops, Steve whiles away his days at the factory and yearns for the company of Sandra, who is sometimes assigned to work alongside him.

The factory runs to the tune of the Governor. Literally. The assembly line moves in time with piped music – as if Music While You Work was a control mechanism. In fact so suffused with music is this story it even begins with an anacrusis.

The key event is when Sandra gives Steve a copy of a vinyl single by the singer Arrythmia, whose iconoclastic attitude encourages rebelliousness.

As I almost said in my review of the anthology it came from, Music For Another World, this story could perhaps have been titled 1984: The Musical. Arrythmia doesn’t suffer too much by that comparison.

This year’s BSFA Awards shortlist has been published.

Five novels have made it this year (I’ve read one) and four short stories (ditto,) five non-fiction pieces and six art works.

I didn’t make the list with Osmotic Pressure (I doubt I was nominated by anyone) but
I’ll look forward to reading the shorts I’ve missed so far: I assume the BSFA will send them out in a booklet as in the past two years. They’ll all likely be available on the web soon I should think – if not already.

Mutation Press, 2010. 270 p.

This is a collection of “Strange Fiction” with music as the linking theme. The stories range through various different types of SF and fantasy with some diversions into Horror. The authors mostly have low profiles though they all seem to have previous publications. In at least some of their contributions the relationship of the tale to the theme was tangential and most did not depend on music for their resolution. That is how it should be, though; a story has to work as a story after all, not fit an arbitrary arrangement.

To my mind the most successful tales were Richard J Goldstein’s Dybbuk Blues, concerning a charmed cornet and the fates of its players, Susan Lanigan’s The Accompanist, where the spirits of Robert and Clara Schumann inhabit the bodies of a teacher and pupil in a Music College, L L Hannett’s Breathing Life Into The Dead, about err…. breathing life into the dead and Gavin Inglis’s Fugue, where a driver crashes on a lonely road and hears a choir singing. Special mentions too to Jim Steel’s The Shostakovich Ensemble, a discography of a rock group from a Stalinist Britain, and Neil Williamson’s Arrhythmia, a kind of 1984 with added songs.

Nothing to do with the quality of the collection or its execution but one thing which irritated me was the occasional tendency for the font size to alter and then soon revert. I found it very distracting trying to decipher what the reason for this might be before concluding there was none.

As in all anthologies, or indeed collections, the quality was variable, but the stories here were never less than readable.