Christmas is the time we feel this the most, something beyond seasonal dissonance, a kind of spiritual and temporal transparency. Our present thoughts, rich with memories of Christmas past, are at once full of the future—the new year, and this year’s end. The season resonates with echoes, reflected in tradition and tale and all our giddy expectations of the time of year. Christmas is never Christmas on its own.
The year holds its breath, takes stock. Just short days later, on those nights where the skies open clear above us, the pavements their mirror in crisp December frost, we’ll stand and toast in mugs of hot mulled stuff to this glorious All-Time. This is a profoundly science fictional moment, to consider all of time and space and where we stand in it. Who we are. How far we’ve come this year. What we’ve achieved. Who couldn’t help but find that awesome, inspirational. Utterly fucking terrifying.
Every year it comes around a little faster. Perhaps this is why we make resolutions for the coming year—to set down anchors as security, promises to ourselves that, despite it all, next year will be better. As if we could ever know. All these things that must be done, resolutions, commitments, deadlines, unravel as time races away with us, leaving us in the same cold predicament year after year.
I shiver beneath bare branches in the narrow streets by the river. The feet of the white houses are buried in brown leaves; more, already skeletal and slippery, muddy the gutters. I think of nothing but how little is left of the year. Of how much I could have done, if I only I hadn’t been ill. How I’ll never make up the time, never catch up. Always feel behind. Never feel settled in this place. My grand plans drift away like leaves.
I pull my scarf closer around my neck, but chill air reaches for the remnants of my cold, catches my breath. I cough, cough again, hard. My breath clouds like mist in front of me.
Breathe.
Breathe in and cough, hack wet and rasping and sore, lungs grating against their insides.
Breathe. Savour the softness of the last balsam tissue against your sore nose. Curse the rough paper of the library toilets.
Breathe. Remember the party. Mulled wine, hot and heady, spilling off a metal spoon. Drops of pulp spilling, squeezed from orange shells bobbing in the ruddy black. The feeling of warmth in your chest.
Breathe the taste of poetry, words, their fat vowels rolling in your mouth. Savour every sensation, every moment. A wooden globe filled with a world of drinks. Butterfly people, transformed by glitter and music. Being read to sleep by terrifying stories. Celebrate it as it passes. The arms of friends. The smell of hot spiced chai. How good it felt to just be there.
Breathe, and wonder when it all changed, the imperceptible click in your mind. Was it when your pen dropped in the middle of class, and you were too focused on the question to notice? The first time you plucked up the courage to talk to a visiting speaker? The invite you didn’t expect? The first time you went out by yourself. The first time the flat door locked behind you, and you were all alone there, and that was okay.
Breathe. The last stretch before home slopes down gently across the bridge, the river wide, from side to side. Nearly home. I wonder, when you read this, whether you’ll be smiling or crying.
Tonight, the skies will fill with meteors and the night will be aflame. I think of milky way pavements, kick leaves that fly like golden stars.
Ruth Booth is a BSFA award-winning author and student living in Glasgow. Her stories and poetry can be found at www.ruthbooth.com
Reviews
The Augur’s Gambit / The King’s Justice
Stephen Donaldson
Gollancz, 192 / 128 pages
Review: Chris Heyman
To describe a creative project as a palette cleanser would seem to disparage it but there is no more fitting term for The Augur’s Gambit and The King’s Justice, shipped as one volume in America but released in the UK as two individual novellas. Over the last four decades Stephen Donaldson has focussed on several multi-volume series, but in a recent gap between epics he has delivered these twin tales that both follow magicians saving their kingdoms. Donaldson uses his gift for rounded characterisation to distinguish these leads, with one protagonist wide eyed and earnest while the other is a jaded husk.
When Stephen King interrupted a run of cocaine epics with his Different Seasons novellas he included winking confirmation that the four disparate stories had a common setting. Donaldson’s tales do not share any hints of co-existence, and this decision works to his advantage. By investing in fresh world building he is able to keep the reader intrigued as the local rules of magic are drip fed on a need to know basis, raising as many questions as they answer. These answers do come, with endings that neatly resolve conflicts that could support much longer books. In interviews Donaldson is keen to play this potential down, positioning himself as an ‘efficient’ writer, where the universe is created to serve the characters, rather than being planned in great detail beforehand. If the character’s story is over, so too is their world.
One such character is Mayhew Gordian of The Augur’s Gambit. As the Queen’s Hieronimer he is a sheltered innocent up to his elbows in dead poultry, looking for the future in the entrails. He’s an odd duck, devoted to his queen and her plucky daughter, Excrucia. The Queen is an assertive and inscrutable presence, using a blinkered Mayhew for her own schemes but ultimately he must find his own path and succeed or fail in the trying. With the Queendom of Indemnie foretold to collapse, Mayhew must learn fast to save his country, with the added obstacle that his particular set of skills can’t tell him the nature of the threat. This leads to a collaboration with the princess to discover the secret of the island community’s mysterious origins. Even as Mayhew’s horizons grow we are never allowed to forget how unpleasant his day job is. This grit is moderate by Donaldson’s extreme standards. His early Thomas Covenant novels took a delight in repulsing the reader from the protagonist and, however weird, Mayhew is consistently sympathetic.
The concision of these stories means a lack of space for supporting characters, but the few we get do make an impression. There is a particularly fun scheming Baron, coming across like a British character actor doing a Hollywood baddie, at least in my head.
The King’s Justice is the leaner novella, and sparks a little less for it. A grizzled old veteran on one last mission is not an original idea but Coriolus Blackened (Just ‘Black’ to you and me) is an interesting enough presence to spend some time snuffing out ne’er do wells with. Suffering from an old war wound of literal holes in the soul, we soon gather that Black is a fairly moral character; a killer he may be but he still finds the time to help out the odd widower in need. Unfortunately this time Black is out of his depth, a spate of lungs and livers torn from corpses portend to a new and powerful magical opponent. There are less rounded female characters here than in the sister tome, with the limited word count meaning that only Black gets fully developed. It’s this brevity that is the story’s downfall, with a cracking setup resolved far too quickly.
Of the two stories, The Augur’s Gambit functions more as a mystery, with Mayhew’s naivety accounting for the reader’s lack of information. The King’s Justice has less narrative logic for such a contrivance, though we do meet Black as he enters a town of unsuspecting villagers. This pushes the reader away from the protagonist, emphasising our distance from Black’s gloomy mission. It is only when Black takes on the case of a murdered child that we realise he is the hero that these people need, give or take a little grave bothering.
In both books the people and places burn bright and fast, aided by a film of blood, filth and corpses that attract and repulse in equal measure. But it’s the stronger The Augur’s Gambit that will linger for longer after reading, and is one world I’m disappointed Donaldson has left behind so quickly.
Thirty Years of Rain
Neil Williamson, Elaine Gallagher, Cameron Johnston (editors)
Lulu Press, 248 pages
Review: Chris Kelso
There’s an old saying that suggests us Scots have more words for rain than an Eskimo does for snow. Despite our majority’s staunchly socialist attitudes and trademark pragmatism, for some reason, Scotland has proved fertile ground for the science fiction community, and for writers in general.
Perhaps it has something to do with escapism? Maybe we’re all communal dreamers in a post-industrial reverie? Or, perhaps it has more to do with the dreichness that hangs over us in omnipresence, with all that brutalist architecture set in gunmetal grey? We’re living the exotic vicariously, you and I.
When it comes to the proliferation of great SF writing, Glasgow in particular remains curiously unparalleled; this is, in no small part, down to the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle—a writers group with a long and prestigious reputation, a refuge for escapists, forged in earnest, and one which has cemented itself as something of an institution since its inauguration thirty years ago. The writers group is also responsible, in part, for the meteoric rise of writers like Louise Welsh, Hal Duncan, Michael Cobley and Phil Raynes
This brings us to Thirty Years of Rain – an anthology edited by Neil Williamson, Elaine Gallagher and Cameron Johnston showcasing some of the myriad talent from the GSFWC. The final product is a stunning achievement, a future artefact for later generations to cherish. This book is a gift.
Most of the GSFWC’s yield are well-represented here. There are stories from newer writers, like Heather Valentine and Kenneth Kelly, to established luminaries of Scottish SF, like Hal Duncan and Gary Gibson (including an informative introduction by Duncan Lunan who was, of course, present during the embryonic stages of the Circle).Our maiden voyage is a story by TJ Berg, one of my personal favourites. The Freedom of Above offers a fascinating meditation on grief. We focus on a man, Alex, who has recently lost his wife, but thanks to a 3D scanner and other cutting edge facilities that are available, Alex obtains a realistic flesh model of her. The tone is dark, a real mood setter, and Berg ruminates about the complicated stages of losing someone you love.
Also worth special mention early on is Ruth Booth’s poem Picture, of a Winter Afternoon which only serves to further highlight her inevitable, imminent success. Thoughtful and masterfully written, everyone should sample Booth’s brand of melancholy.
There are gems hidden amongst the shorter works here too—TW Moses’s Purge-esque metaphor for keyboard warriors is brilliant, Ian Hunter’s witty list of things to know about staple-removers will have you chuckling, and Jim Campbell’s flash fiction piece which details one man’s quest through a suburban wilderness to find the illusive “Amanda”. These are just a few examples.
Another one of my favourites, Fergus Bannon’s The Unusual Genitals Party is about a group of university students who hold a twisted soiree and offer prize money to, yes, you’ve guessed it, the most unusual genitals on display. Bannon’s prose is exquisitely seedy and the story’s slow-build and concurrent climax (excuse the pun) is deliciously droll in its execution, more than you’d imagine might be present in a story so titled. Bannon is another writer teetering on the ergosphere of greatness. Definitely check him out.
