Dedalus, 2019, 335 p. Reviewed for Interzone 275, May-Jun 2018.

In his previous eight novels Crumey has constructed a strange niche for himself from his considerations of music, parallel worlds, imagined universes, the rendering of scientific concepts thought to be abstruse into accessible fictional form, all peopled with credible characters experiencing real human dilemmas. He is not beyond literary playfulness. Here we start with “The Unbeginning”, finish with “The Unending” and “The Introduction” comes as part three.
His latest novel is unconventional even in Crumey’s terms. It’s presented as a series of tales, which at first sight appear to have only the most tenuous of links between them (if any at all) yet on closer examination yield foreshadowings and echoes, subtle resonances – both with themselves and the rest of his oeuvre. We have a scene from the life of a man genetically blind due to his father’s exposure to H-bomb tests, a tale of mistaken identity on the international conference scene, an imagined interview, the thoughts of a lecturer undergoing a CT scan, how silk worms came to Europe, a man suspecting his wife of an affair, a fragment from a life of Beethoven, a young woman visiting her father on a Greek island after an abortion, the consciousness of a concert pianist who comes on like a hit man, the spying activities around the military secret that was early FM radio, a postman’s reminiscences, a lecture given by an insect, the story of The Burrows (a vast tunnelling project the length and breadth of Scotland) and the underground habitat which results, the invention of the word-camera which captures a scene and renders it in text, a woman bumping into someone she thought was dead (so reversing the previous collapse of her wave function,) a philosophical discussion of a Moslowski-Carlson machine to replicate Earth light years away, extracts from a truly awful SF novel inhabiting just that universe, a metaphor about the dangers of seeking fire.

They’re all beautifully written, pitch perfect to the milieux portrayed but also interspersed with a sly humour. “‘Bradley’s a real philosopher, incidentally, by which I mean a dead one,’” and in The Burrows section, “Some international medical authorities insisted that being starved of sunlight would cause long-term health problems but the Scots had been managing like that for centuries and it hadn’t done them any harm,” with ice-cream having a surprisingly prominent presence.

The text comments on itself, “A conventional novel or story collection is a sequence of parts in some predetermined order. We could of course read them any way we like,” and provides “layers of fiction”. Characters note variously a tendency to inconsistency, that imitation is the most fundamental human impulse, “‘We describe everything in terms of its similarity or difference compared to something else.’” That things aren’t what they seem or are described as being different to what they are. There are thoughts on a “past that wasn’t there,” “spurious influences”, “the night she didn’t have, with him instead of Matt. There is only now, she thought. Nothing else has any existence.” The five-second thrill of a life that never happened. The territory between being and non-being. One character says, “‘what neither of us can imagine is a universe without space and time,’” yet elsewhere we have, “‘Time is an appearance not a reality.’”

Despite “the interconnections by which the world is made a coherent whole,” even the most straightforward mainstream passages are saturated with subtle indeterminacies which it would be easy to overlook. Statements like, “‘You concentrate on that object…. visualise it as clearly as you can. Until it becomes no longer itself,’” or, “‘Alfredo Galli wanted to create a matrix of compositional elements through which numerous paths could be conceived, each a possible book with its own multiplicity of readings,’” and “History is an infinite superposition,” but “‘The universe is a circle…. A great chain of living and dying, giving and taking. Every moment is a link.’” “‘There is only one not many. No Difference, only Alike.’” Yet, “all literary style is really a kind of selection, a form of negation,” and “any path through the matrix of narrative possibilities should be a story not only scandalously disjointed but also inherently inconsistent: an appearance betraying its own unreality.”

What we have here is perhaps a literary expression of sonata form – “in the development the tunes get mixed up,” but with something to be discovered between the tones yet nevertheless totally accomplished.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- jack-in-the-boxes (just sounds odd to me. But what is a more sensible plural? Jacks-in-the-box? Jacks-in-boxes? Jacks-in-the-boxes?) “The audience were applauding” (the audience was,) “All the burden of his father’s ambitions were lifted” (the burden was lifted,) liquified (liquefied; liquefy was used earlier,) “Ten Downing Street” (usually 10 Downing Street,) “the way his generation speak” (speaks,) Guttenberg (Gutenberg,) “umbilical chord” (that’s a cord,) “Marks and Spencers” (Marks and Spencer’s,) midgie (there is no such thing; it’s a midge,) CO2 (CO₂,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of direct speech.

Filles Vertes Publishing, 2018, 317 p. Reviewed for Interzone 275, May-Jun 2018.

This novel is centred on the explosion of a V-1 Flying Bomb in Lewisham, London, in 1944 where fifty-one people were killed, hence the book’s title. It also features time travel in a way which has unavoidably noticeable echoes of Connie Willis’s “Oxford” series of tales but is in some respects better plotted and certainly not so prone to the narrative deferral to which Willis seems so wedded. Do not be put off by the book’s cover, which admittedly does have a doodlebug on it, but otherwise conveys a misleading impression of the contents. There is an element of romance here and it drives part of the plot but it is by no means the narrative’s main concern.

In the early 2020s experiments at CERN led by one Axel Darnell showed certain particles to be travelling back in time. Soon (too soon?) this discovery was extended into sending back animals then humans and the OffTime organisation was set up not only to explore the past for historical knowledge but also to monitor and amend any changes in the timeline.

There are two main settings, London in 2040 where the offices of OffTime are located and the same city during the 1940s war years. A prologue set in Koblenz in 1954 does rather give the game away about where we might be headed and we return there for the epilogue.
In the main story Jacob Wesson and his partner (in the romantic sense) Hannah Benedict are part of an OffTime team sent to 1941 to thwart an assassination attempt on Churchill. From the off there are odd aspects to this venture, including why it is even necessary, and of course things do not go smoothly. Jacob’s retrieval to 2040 in the middle of an air-raid is interrupted by a mysterious voice. Instead he jumps to 1943. While in 1941 Jacob (literally) bumped into one Amy Jenkins – about whose life we had been told in a previous chapter – then disturbed her wedding preparations. In implementing the “lost retrieval” protocol he meets up again with Amy (widowed in the same air-raid which disrupted the retrieval), and eventually despairing of being brought back to his own time allows himself to form an attraction to her. When contact is finally made Jacob has no option but to return to 2040, leaving Amy behind. But she follows him to the pick-up point and is projected into her future – against the supposed laws of time travel. Jacob and his team are faced with the dilemma of what to do with her and more importantly, what else have they not been told?

If you examine this in any detail it all vanishes in smoke of course. Any alteration of past events scenario is necessarily prone to that, however – unless it restores the time we know. There are certain pointers, though, that the past into which the team is sent is not our past (the “real” past?) and the 2040 shown here always seems contingent.

There are some problematic aspects to the narrative. Barnham has a tendency to tell the reader things rather than show them. The information dumping is not well integrated into the text and at times too crude. There is a bagginess to the prose, a tendency to repetition of things we already know. The necessity to make a time jump naked in order to avoid temporarily debilitating nausea was also a bit of hand-waving overkill. The dynamics of the relationship between Jacob and Hannah are underplayed and, for a supposed grand passion, that between Jacob and Amy is too restrained.

This is a US publication and so accommodations must be made but putting transatlantic speech patterns* into the mouths of 1940s Londoners can only jar with the British reader. Particularly egregious was the substitution of “Mum” by “Mom” in the wording of a famous wartime poster which consequently totally fails to embody the pun necessary for its effect. And that’s a pity as it immediately hauls said reader out of the story.

For all that, fans of a good time travel romp will enjoy this. The plotting is clever (if transparent, so that the twist in the tail came as not entirely a surprise.) Were Barnham to be more confident in his ability – and in the reader’s – eliminate repetition, tighten up on info-dumping and expand on characterisations sometimes too closely linked to plot necessities, his creations would breathe more freely.

The following did not appear in the published review.
Pedant’s corner:- *eg “‘we can go help them’” (go and help them,) “‘will go find’” (go and find.) “Be Like Dad, Keep Mom” (“Keep Mom” makes absolutely no sense. Unlike “keep mum”, which means “don’t say anything”.) “to get back with the program” (not a phraseology appropriate to a 1940s Londoner.)
Otherwise; “probably” appeared twice within the space of one line, “‘Keep out of sight and be ready to get into position right on the dot?’” (isn’t a question so needs no question mark,) “Code One” (really? Nothing more original for an emergency signal?) “The Heinkel bombers” (just “the Heinkels”, bombers is unnecessary,) “and what was doing there” (what was he doing there.) “‘But I finally I have some news’” (drop one of those “I”s ), “or tables, to be precise since she’d pushed” (the comma is misplaced “or tables to be precise, since she’d pushed”.) Jenkins’ (Jenkins’s,) “Amy had never seen a color (sic) photograph” (but coloured cinema films surely?) “the shops on this side of the Thames were closed for the weekend” (for Sunday maybe, but not the whole weekend,) practice (I thought the USian was always practise,) “get ahold” (get a hold,) “within a few days they’d break out and advance south towards Paris” (the D-Day breakout took longer than a few days after D-Day and Paris was east of the landing area, perhaps an indication of this not being “our” past.)

The New Curiosity Shop, 134 p.

All-women issue published on International Women’s Day.

In Pull up a Log,^a Guest Editors Pippa Goldschmidt, Caroline Grebell and Monica Burns note that some potential contributors to this special issue did not want to be cordoned off in such a way, bemoaning the general lack of submissions to SF markets by women writers, but rejoice in the many good submissions received – too many for this one edition, and lament the passing of Ursula Le Guin to whom they dedicate the issue.

Unusually we start with a poem, Speculative Fiction by Katherine McMahon. Later on the non-fiction has S J McGeachy’s “Frankenstein: the Nuts and Bolts of Genre Mash-up”^b wherein the essayist feels Mary Shelley’s greatest achievement wasn’t so much the invention of a new genre but in ignoring the constraints of a previous one where in effect women didn’t matter. “Confessions of a Science Fiction She-nerd” by Jonatha Kottler tells us how the author got into SF, there is an interview with Lisanne Normann conducted by Caroline Grebell, “Noise and Sparks: Beyond the Mountains” by Ruth E J Booth finds the author disappointed in the Wonder Woman film’s failure to resonate with her personally while recognising it did with others, and arguing for more diverse stories on the mainstream. Reviews has only books by female authors all reviewed by women. Marija Smits^c finds Helen Segdwick’s The Growing Season slightly flawed, Eris Young^d looks at Lidia Yulnavitch’s Book of Joan,^e Shelly Bryant’s collection Launch Pad lacks dynamism made up for by ambition according to Georgina Murray,^f Samantha Dolan^g appreciates N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Lucy Powell^h calls The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers a tour de force. To that last I can only say, “What?” Multiverseⁱ has six poems by three poets, Catherine Edmunds, Paige Smith and Katie Fanthorpe.
As to the fiction:
A Slow Unfurling of Truth¹ by Aliette de Bodard is a human tale of betrayal, filial duty and redemption wound round a memory encoding device in a colonially exploited setting.
In Write ME² by Emily Bowles women’s bodies are being adapted to service the preservation of language in order to maintain male privilege and power.
Heading for the Border³ by Karen Heuler is set in a post-apocalyptic world invaded by aliens who bombed a nuclear reactor. Two women scratch a living selling cosmetics from the back of a truck to help improve the survivors’ morale.
Lith Amenti’s Sacrifice for a Broken Sky⁴ has a father about to sacrifice his daughter to placate what appears to be a black hole tearing at the fabric of the world. It isn’t, quite, and the story’s resolution doesn’t fit with its beginning.
In Do No Harm⁵ by Anna Ibbotson the reward for coming in the top two in an online virtual reality cancer eradicating game is to treat patients in the real world. The top guy is very casual about the process.
#No Bad Vibes⁶ by Katy Lemon is narrated via alien edited audio transcripts of and commentary on posts by an internet influencer. The aliens are using her to promote their message. Misunderstandings are mutual.
Sim Bajwa’s HR Confidential⁷ is a set of recorded exchanges between an employee and Human Resources along with their accompanying memos. The employee’s complaints relate to an overbearing line manager and the company’s subsequent efforts to improve productivity.
In Pearls That Were His Eyes⁸ by Jen Downes, a soldier conscripted due to bankruptcy is injured in an attack but the ocean into which he falls, apparently to his death, is riddled with downed military medical bots.

Pedant’s corner:- two of the responses to Caroline Grebell’s Twitter requests, ‘Why do you read SciFi?’ ‘Your favourite female SciFi author?’ are printed twice – and I hate the contraction SciFi. It’s SF. ^a“there are a plethora of voices” (a plethora is singular, so ‘there is a plethora of voices’.) ^bH G Wells’ (Wells’s.) ^c“the brief mention to epigenetics” (mention of.) ^d‘geocatacysm’ (later in the review it’s ‘geocataclysm’,) ^ethe book’s cover – illustrated on the page – has The Book of Joan. ^f“For all intents and purposes” (is this USian? It’s ‘to all intents and purposes’,) sat (sitting,) “out with” (outwith.) ^gpalette (palate.) ^hChambers’ (Chambers’s,) Jenks’ (Jenks’s,) Chambers’ (this one wasn’t a possessive, so, Chambers.) ⁱIn the author information; Edmunds’ (Edmunds’s,) “where she feel most at home” (feels.)
¹“the back of their hands” (strictly that should be backs,) [“We should “] (that second quote mark is inverted in the text – an opening mark rather than a closing one – no doubt due to the character space between itself and ‘should’,) “Too young for everything that had might have happened off-world to him” (either ‘had’ or ‘might have’, not both,) “had insisted to come” (is not an English construction, ‘had insisted on coming’ is,) “she’d return the capital with one more authentication” (return to the capital,) “the man who pretended himself Simalli Fargeau” (again isn’t an English construction, ‘presented himself as’ or ‘pretended to be’.) ²written in USian, “a few strings savaged from a piano” (salvaged? Though, given the story’s premise savaged makes sense,) spit (the past tense is ‘spat’. I don’t care how USians say or spell it, it just is,) sprung (sprang.) “I on the other had simply gave him back one word at a time” (on the other hand.) ³Written in USian, Ikea (IKEA.) ⁴Written in USian, “Before, he thought before that he had prepared” (one ‘before’ too many I’d have thought,) “Hedda holds very last of her treasures” (holds the very last.) ⁵James’ (James’s,) “‘for hells sake’” (hell’s.) ⁶“individual specie traits” (‘specie’ means ‘in kind’ and hence ‘coins’. It is not the singular of species.) ⁷“‘For fucks suck’” (suck? And it should be fuck’s.) ⁸“this damn’ battle” (I fail to see the necessity of the apostrophe.)

Hamlyn, 1983, 173 p

Lynn is one of those 70s-80s writers who published more fantasy than SF and as a consequence kind of passed me by. A Different Light is certainly SF rather than Fantasy, though.
Its main viewpoint character, Jimson Anneca, is an artist with incurable cancer, controllable unless he goes off-world. He is frustrated by this restriction. Given the chance to travel to the off-chart world of Demea to retrieve some Masks for a client, he accepts. Once there he and his companions finds this supposedly uninhabited planet has occupants who object to removal of their culturally significant Masks which turn out to be some sort of mind amplifier. Thereafter the story morphs into a tale about telepathy. A Different Light is pretty run of the mill fare even for its time and shows its age when talking about tapes for recording and playback of brain states.

Pedant’s corner:- “Now, does he know what he’s talking about? wondered Jimson” (has a question mark in the middle of a sentence; not only is it in the middle of a sentence it is arguably unnecessary,) “a gravity of two gees” (a gravity of two g,) “the rainbow changing of the ship before it jumped was like watching a real rainbow” (eh?) Nexus’ (Nexus’s, x2.) “‘The dust is debris that once were stars,’” (debris that once was stars.) “Her skill insured that” (ensured; is ‘insured’ used in this context USian?)

BSFA, 2019, 104 p.

It would appear from the nominations for shorter fiction appearing in this year’s booklet that the SF short story is dead. Barring the last in the booklet none of the shortlisted stories is printed in its entirety. The others are all extracts from longer pieces of fiction.
Nina Allan’s The Gift of Angels: an introduction¹ is narrated by a Science Fiction writer, whose mother was the first person on Mars but whose fate remains unknown, and tells what appears to be his life story. The tale riffs on and critiques the films La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys. Allan has a beautiful writing touch. I did want to find the longer version to finish it. The story, though, refers to Harry Potter and Game of Thrones as famous. I doubt these will be quite such cultural touchstones in the fifty years or so time when this is set as they are now.
I read The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct by Malcolm Devlin in Interzone 275, where it was first published. I reviewed the issue it appeared in here.
The Land of Somewhere Safe³ by Hal Duncan is one of the author’s Scruffians stories. Here we have a wonderfully linguistically inventive tale (Dunstravaigin Castle is a brilliant coinage) involving wartime evacuees to Skye and a Nazi spy.
The magnificent Time Was by Ian McDonald I reviewed here.
Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries Vol 4)⁵ by Martha Wells is narrated by a murder bot apparently lured to a planet by an organisation that has sequestered its boss. The story suffers from being told to us rather than shown and did not grab me in the slightest.
Phosphorus⁶ by Liz Williams is set on Mars and the planet Winterstrike. One of its viewpoint characters is dead. However, the extract is not really long enough to judge whether its balance is askew or not nor to evaluate the story properly.
Kingfisher⁷ by Marian Womack is set in a future where wildlife is all but vanished and human births a rarity yet libraries seem to abound. Our protagonist is saddled with a useless tool of a husband, an abiding sense of failure and a fascination with birds. There is a hint of a writerly sensibility lurking underneath the prose but the story is riddled with a ridiculous number of errata.

The non-fiction nominees section contains two of Nina Allan’s “Time Pieces”^a columns from Interzone, ditto for Ruth E J Booth’s Shoreline of Infinity essays published as “Noise and Sparks”, Liz Bourke has five of her “Sleeps with Monsters”^b columns for Tor.com, Aliette de Bodard writes “On Motherhood and Erasure”^c from the blog “Intellectus Speculativus” and there is an extract from Adam Roberts’s “Publishing and the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance”^d.

Pedant’s corner:- ¹“A sinister band of scientists prey off” (a band preys off,) “sprung up” (sprang up,) “the museum has replacedtheir stash” (its stash,) “a cetain child .. finds themselves” (a child finds itself.) ³puntied in (punted?) argylle socks (argyle,) liptick (lipstick seems intended but liptick may be one of Duncan’s neologisms.) ⁵GrayCris’ (GrayCris’s.) ⁶governess’ (governess’s,) mistress’ (mistress’s,) “The scatter of hovels erected at the tip of the Tail were the last to fall behind..” (The scatter … was the last.) ⁷ “each bar offered their personal take” (each bar offered its personal take,) statues becomes statue several lines later, “a prevalent Sun descended” (a prominent Sun?) “it was frightening how comforting was to fall back into” (how comforting it was to.) “The library would pay for my librarianship degree on the sole condition that I came back to work for them for three or four years” (to work for it, or, to work there,) “climbing up thopusands of miles up in the air” (one ‘up’ too many,) a ‘seem’ where ‘seemed’ fits the other tenses in the sentence, “and they would let themselves been touched” (be touched,) “Jonas was better at cooking at me” (than me,) “scribbled in old pieces of reclaimed paper” (scribbled on,) “in a strangely elaborated [dream]” (elaborate.) “I looked a Jonas” (at Jonas.) “I fell a moment of void” (I felt.) “I had never knew whsat to do with it” (I had never known, or, I never knew,) although there were not fluff” (although they were not fluff,) “but they seem to accumulate” (seemed,) “when I notice a stain” (noticed,) “too look inside” (to look,) “the dinning room” (dining room,) “what they where for” (were for.) “Whener I don’t remember what it means to be sad I took it out and look at those pages” (either ‘remembered’, and ‘looked’, or, ‘take’,) “minus zero” (that would be zero, then,) “magazines cut-outs” (magazine cut-outs,) “I had tided them up” (tidied,) “plastics bags” (plastic bags.) “They were not native to the local fauna” (‘They were not native’, or, ‘they were not local fauna’,) “so effectively they had contaminated the environment” (so effectively had they contaminated the environment.)
^a“are startling out of step” (startlingly.) ^b“I’m going to look at take two books together” (either ‘look at’ or ‘take’ not both, automatons (automata,) “Neither of them resolve anything” (neither of them resolves anything,) “[X]’s .. pregnancy …. and her feelings … is central to the narrative” (there’s an ‘and’ in there; that makes for a plural verb subject, so, ‘are central’.) “The poets are most affect by” (affected by.) ^c“are littered with the death of mothers” (deaths.) ^d“is comic-satiric impossible voyage” (is a comic-satiric impossible voyage,) “triple-decker length SF form this era” (from, I think,) “the content of which were published” (was published.)

The New Curiosity Shop, 132 p

In Pull up a Log Editor-in-Chief Noel Chidwick rightly notes the achievement of the magazine reaching its tenth edition. There are Judge’s Reports by Eric Brown and Pippa Goldsmith on Shoreline’s flash fiction competition followed by a celebration of The Worthy Winners and shortlistees^b. Three of these stories appear in this edition (see *.) Tales From the Beachcomber riffs on the human fascination with powers of ten via the life and works of Arthur C Clarke, there’s an interview with Helen Sedgwick by Pippa Goldschmidt^c, in Noise and Sparks: The Company of Bears, Ruth E J Booth lauds the interactions and memories convention going brings, the tolerance it fosters. Reviews^d considers Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, the Jonathan Strahan edited Infinity Wars, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack by Nate Crowley, 2084 edited by George Sandison, and The Clockwork Dynasty: A Novel by Daniel H Wilson. Multiverse has poems by Rachel Plummer, Jo-Ella Sarich and Rosemary Badcoe. Parabolic Puzzles^e challenges the reader to identify twelve SF writers from their photographs and very brief information about them.

Little Freedoms by Ephiny Gale¹ is set in a closed room where some sort of endurance test of nine characters is taking place with various tasks to be undertaken – such as not touching, not speaking, not breathing. The winner gains freedom (from an unspecified but clearly onerous existence.) The others are restored to their former state.
Sweet Compulsion by Chris Bailey is told to us rather than shown and overall feels more like a sketch of a story than the complete article. Riddled with quotations from Paradise Lost it features a world in which people’s thoughts are etched onto others’ skins.
In Junk Medicine² by Die Booth plastic ownership is outlawed but there are still people willing to pay over the odds for items made from it. This story does for plastic what Number Ten Q Street did for real food.
ATU334 The Wise*³ by Marija Smits is a future tale of Baba Yaga and an importuner, the titular ATU334.
If Thine Eyes Offend Thee⁴ by Daniel Rosen is narrated by Elsa whose ambition was always to be a mermaid. We see the lengths of body reconstruction and skulduggery she will go to to win the Miss Cosmos competition.
Pauline and the Bahnians*⁵ by S K Farrell is set on a demilitarised outpost turned into a – possibly illegal – smallholding. Its weapons are still there though.
The narrator of The Apple Bee⁶ by K E McPhee is marooned on an island on a mostly water planet, with no communication with the rest of humanity and only potatoes, apples and corn as a food supply.
Don’t Speak; Don’t Listen⁷ by Serena Johe explores the ramifications of an implant that prevents the speaker insulting or denigrating anyone.
A Choice for the Golden Age* by Matthew Castle was the overall winner of the flash fiction competition. It’s set on a generation starship which rotates its crew (and holds its genetic cargo permanently) in suspended animation.

Pedant’s corner:- ^aIn the cover artist’s (Dave Alexander) information paragraph; “His biggest claim to fame were the two front covers he painted for DC Thomson’s Starblazer series” (His biggest claim to fame was the two front covers.) ^b“As economical a tone-poem … it’s” (As economical as a tone-poem.) ^cnot mentioned on the contents page. ^d“if the government get wind of him” (gets,) “while others featuring AIs and a couple are” (the rest of the verb forms in this sentence are indicative so ‘feature’,) “take several different aspects … and extrapolated them” (extrapolate them,) “how will it effect you” (affect was meant,) Watts’ (Watts’s,) a missing full stop at the end of a review, bail out (bail-out,) counsellors (as I remember the book it was councillors,) Eric Morecombe (Morecambe,) political dissension (dissent I would think.) “Although, some readers have taken issue with” (no comma after ‘although’,) as though there maybe” (as though there may be,) “into this under ground world” (underground.) ^e“The winning team …. were amply rewarded” (The winning team was amply rewarded.)
¹“a couple of pair of trousers” (a couple of pairs of trousers.) ²whinging (whingeing,) there’s a missing full stop, “Carbonari’s” (earlier it was Carboneri’s.) ³Written in USian. ⁴Written in USian – though curiously we have manoeuvre instead of maneuver – there is a full stop instead of a comma at the end of piece of direct speech embedded in a longer sentence. “Scales in every spectrum of the rainbow” (suggests the author doesn’t know what spectrum means.) “I let her wheel me all the way back to my room and offered me another drag of her vaporiser” (offer.) “Auroras antennae flickered” (Aurora’s.) “The voice rumbles like through the water in a sticky molasses bass.” (The only way I can make sense of this sentence is if the ‘like’ is redundant.) ⁵“(what is a Bahnian, please?).” (doesn’t need the full stop.) ⁶“Quite early on he’d abandoned the neatly organised rows and began planting” (begun is more grammatical,) we have ‘gotten’ and ‘maneuvered’ (the author is Aussie which wil possibly explain these.) ⁷“someone shined a light” (shone. It’s shone a light.)

This year’s booklet arrived this morning.

It contains all the short fiction and non-fiction nominees for the BSFA Awards for works published in 2018 and the artworks nominated for the relevant award.

On perusing it I found the closing date for electronic voting is today so I had a lot of reading to pack in this afternoon.

I have been expecting the booklet’s arrival since the turn of the month and was getting worried it would not be forthcoming in time.

Eastercon, which I will not be attending this year, where the final awards will be announced, is of course this Sunday coming.

TTA Press

Sean McMullen’s guest Editorial^a argues real life has not, quite, caught up with Science Fiction. Andy Hedgcock’s Future Interrupted^b riffs on the drawbacks of repetition and sequels in art while noting the originality of recent radio works by Stephen Bacziewicz and Anita Sullivan. Aliya Whiteley’s Climbing Stories ponders the writer’s relationship with and duty towards morality via her life experiences with role-playing games. In Book Zone Andy Hedgecock^c comes round to Anthomy Burgess’s Puma despite the author’s disparagement of SF, Ian Hunter^d appreciates Suzannah Evans’s poetry collection Near Future, Duncan Lawie finds reacquainting himself with Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series in Europe at Dawn a warm, comforting experience, Juliet McKenna says Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox is whooly fresh and intensely gripping, Barbara Melville is charmed by the reprint of Starfield edited by Duncan Lunan, Stephen Theaker’s initial reservations about The Sky Woman by J D Moyer are overcome by the tory’s development into a “solid three-star book”, while Ian Sales finds Derek Kunsken’s The Quantum Magician naggingly familiar.
As to the fiction:-
In The Backstitched Heart of Katharine Wright¹ by Alison Wilgus, Katharine, the sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright, is able to unravel time and retsitch it to prevent Orville’s early deaths.
The Fukinaga Special Chip Job² by Tim Chagawa has its narrator travelling to all the world’s floating cities seeking out the mythical crisps of the title.
This Buddhafield Is Not Your Buddhafield³ by William Squirrell is printed sideways and tells the tale of a cleaner on a structure in the clouds of Uranus, a structure whose owner never lives there.
For the Wicked Only Weeds Will Grow⁴ by G V Anderson is set on a kind of interplanetary hospice called Requis. A curmudgeonly Terran tests the narrator’s soothing powers. The story displays an idiosyncratic approach to personal pronouns, use of which seems to depend on species but is inconsistent.
In Seven Stops Along the Graffiti Road by David Cleden survivors of an unspecified catastrophe wend their way along a road bedecked with graffiti – all of it encouraging. The road however becones strange at night, when they are all safely off to the side at way-stations.
Terminalia by Sean McMullen⁵ is a cod-Edwardian piece of fiction about cardiac resuscitation, a mechanical lady and the elimination of ghosts. The story is good but its execution feels more than a bit rushed.

Pedant’s corner:- ^adiscrete adultery (discreet that would be.) ^bidentify (identity makes more sense,) “there are a different set of irritations” (there is a different set.) ^cdisks (discs, please.) ^dEvans’ (Evans’s,)
¹Written in USian, “[she] lays on her bed” (lies,) ²Written in USian; the story refers to a seal eating a penguin in the Arctic. (Well, I suppose the penguin might have escaped from a Norwegian zoo, otherwise tha’s one hell of a journey it took,) nautilus’ (nautilus’s.) ³Simplicius Simplicissmus (Simplicius Simplicissimus,) “Her mother’s anxiety at this abundance are compressed on the pages” (either ‘anxieties’ or ‘is compressed’.) ⁴sanatoria is used throughout as a singular noun, lieftenant (lieutenant,) maw (it’s on a plant. Plants do not have stomachs.) ⁵the contents page says Seam McMullen. “Quite possibly none of them were” (none of them was,) a photo (I doubt Edwardians used this contraction,) “I have a suite questions” (a suite of questions,) “a household electricity socket” (in 1905? Unlikely but just about possible,) “‘Word will be discretely put about’” (discreetly.)

I was sad to read today of the death of Vonda N McIntyre.

She first came to my attention with the short story Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand – a Nebula Award winner in 1974 and which formed the first part of her later novel Dreamsnake which won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel in 1979. The stroy was unusual in that its protagonist was a healer rather than a fighter. It was immediately obvious McIntyre’s writing was up there with the best the genre had to offer.

Looking at my records I find I have six of her books (including one short story collection.) One of the novels, The Entropy Effect, was in the Star Trek franchise, and much better written than it probably needed to be.

I reviewed her 1986 novel Superluminal here.

In all she won three Nebulas and that Hugo.

She may not have been prolific as a writer and not so prominent latterly as she was at the turn of the 1970s/80s but she is undoubtedly one of the most noteworthy SF authors of the late twentieth century.

Vonda Neel McIntyre: 28/8/1948 – 1/4/2019. So it goes.