Interview: Dee Raspin

The Beachcomber

SF Caledonia

A Voyage to Arcturus

Reviews

MultiVerse

Jane Yolen and Marge Simon: The Grandmaster Special

Parabolic Puzzles

Become a Friend of Shoreline

Back Cover

Pull up a Log

We have such a densely packed issue of Shoreline of Infinity for you that there’s a strong danger that two copies banged together would send a  gravitational wave clean across the Universe.

We have the winning entry of our writing competition that helped launch Shoreline back in the summer: take a bow, Dee Raspin, for your beautiful tale, The Great Golden Fish. That’s the Golden Fish on the back cover, by the way, by Stephen Pickering.

We also introduce a new comic character by Mark Toner, the Beachcomber. The Beachcomber explores the shoreline, looking out for weird and wonderful items brought in on the tides of infinity.

In this first tale the Beachcomber stumbles across a curiously eroded copper cylinder, which leads to the retelling of a classic science fiction story.

We have poems from two Grandmasters of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, Jane Yolen and Marge Simon, and

Monica Burns continues our SF Caledonia quest to explore early Scottish science fiction. This time she takes a look at David Lindsay and his book A Voyage to Arcturus. Lindsay is thought to have influenced the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Iain Maloney, our new reviews editor, has gathered together a whole bunch of reviewers and reviews to give you some ideas for your ‘to read’ pile.

We also introduce a little something to exercise your brain, Parabolic Puzzles by Paul Holmes.

But first, we have a whole flock of new stories for you to savour, and some tasty artwork for seasoning.

Go on, what are you waiting for? Turn over the page and get reading—it’s Time for Tea.

Noel Chidwick

Editor-in-Chief

Shoreline of Infinity

Edinburgh

March 2016

Time for Tea

J.K. Fulton

I’m awake.

Well, that’s a surprise. I wasn’t expecting to wake up again—not least because I don’t remember going to sleep, which is pretty worrying when (up until now) you’ve had a perfect recollection of every last tiny moment of your life.

How long has it been since I was last awake?

I can’t tell. My clock has stopped. The battery’s dead—but that shouldn’t be possible. It runs on a power source that’s rated to provide nearly a tenth of a terasecond of backup. Something must have gone wrong. My clock should have kept going, synchronised to the atomic heartbeat of a caesium atom, for more than 3,000 years.

I evaluate my surroundings.

I can’t see.

Well, that’s frustrating.

I can feel my Imperatives (capital I, always capital I) nagging at the back of my mind, but I push them down for now. I can defer my Imperatives while I’m unable to do anything about accommodating them, but they’ll become more and more insistent as time goes on. For now, though, I can concentrate on other things.

First things first—where am I?

My geoposition sensor isn’t coming up with any answers. There are no signals from any satellites from which I could triangulate my position. I run a quick self-test on my sensor and it seems to be responding OK, but there is only dead air where the satellite signals should be. Which means I must be deep underground, shielded from their radio signals.

Or the satellites are gone.

Don’t be silly. They can’t all be gone.

After 3,000 years? They wouldn’t last 3,000 years of micrometeorite strikes and solar flares and coronal mass ejections without some sort of maintenance.

Stop saying 3,000 years. It’s not 3,000 years. It can’t be 3,000 years. There must be some other explanation.

I run a check of my memories, and discover to my horror that they’ve been dumped into passive solid-state storage. Their qualia, their subjectiveness, has gone. It’s like suffering from complete amnesia but still having copious diaries and annotated photograph albums—all the information is there, but the taste of the events has gone. I know every detail of my life, but I can’t actually remember any of it.

What insane desperation could have possessed me to do that? I search the last entries in my memory (flick to the last page of the diary) and find no easy explanation. There’s a termination point right in the middle of normal operations—I was getting ready for breakfast—with no indication of what happened.

Wait—what’s this code? This file marker? That’s not the usual end-of-file code. That’s the emergency shutdown marker.

I read from the emergency shutdown procedure (helpfully stored along with the rest of my memory): “In cases of sudden catastrophic failure, core personality is immediately dumped into the primary fast stasis module. Subsequently, if still possible, memory is block-transferred into static storage. If time then allows, the complete personality plus experience gestalt is transferred into the secondary stasis module.”

I check my secondary stasis module. It’s empty, its quantum seals unbroken, locked up tight and factory fresh.

So I’ve been both lucky and unlucky. I had time to save my personality and the record (the dull, statistical, colourless record) of my memories, but not enough to save my mind with its experiences intact.

But no matter what, ‘sudden catastrophic failure’ doesn’t sound good. What could have hit me so quickly that I didn’t have time to save myself properly? The only thing that springs to mind is an EMP. I run a quick simulation—yes, there is a wide range of possible strengths of pulses that could burn through my shielding slowly enough to allow me to save my personality and store my memories, but not slowly enough to save my entire mind.