ISFDB link
Other reviews:1
Various, Goodreads
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Editor, Noel Chadwick; Deputy Editor, Russell Jones
Do Not Pass GO • short story by Helen Jackson
Aeaea • short story by Robert Gordon ∗
Jammers • short story by Anton Rose ∗∗
Paradise Bird • short story by J. S. Richardson ∗
Sand and Rust • short story by W. G. White ∗∗+
Sleeping Fire • short story by Elva Hills ∗
The Square Fella • reprint short story by Duncan Lunan ∗∗∗+
Cover • by Siobahn McDonald
Interior artwork • by Jackie Duckworth, Tsu Beel, Jessica Good, Mark Toner, Sydney Jordan
Pull Up a Log • editorial by Iain Maloney
The Beachcomber Presents • comic strip by Mark Toner
SF Caledonia: Crossing the Starfield • essay by Chris Kelso
Moon: Flash Fiction Competition
Interview: Ada Palmer • interview by Eris Young
Noise and Sparks: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Genre • essay by Ruth E. J. Booth
Reviews
Multiverse • poetry by Caroline Hardaker, Ken Poyner; art portfolio (x3) by Elizabeth Dulemba
Spot the Difference • puzzle by Tsu Beel
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Shoreline of Infinity is a Scottish SF magazine that started in Summer 2015, founded by, according to the masthead,2 Editor Noel Chadwick and Art Director Mark Toner. I bought a copy of #2, and since then I’ve been getting regular emails when a new issue came out. That said, I never got around to reading the issue I bought or buying any others: the covers3 on #7 to #11 put me off a little to be honest, but it was mostly apathy. When the email announcing the publication of the ‘twelfth’ issue arrived (actually the fourteenth, don’t ask) I looked at the Cover, looked at it again, and then found myself on the site buying a copy.4 This striking piece did exactly what it should do—sell the magazine. As Shoreline normally does a series of covers by one artist we will hopefully see more work by Siobahn McDonald.
Before I start talking about the fiction I suppose I should note that I wasn’t expecting much from this semi-pro magazine (it pays low rates), but I found a couple of items of interest.
Do Not Pass GO by Helen Jackson, unfortunately, isn’t one of them. It is a rather unbelievable story about a banker asking a time-travel agency employee called Joanna to plant a board game called Property is Best in the eighteenth century. The aim of this is to introduce generations of children to the benefits of capitalism, and therefore improve the reputation of Bankers.
Joanna goes back in time, meets with a woman called Elizabeth Magie, and passes on the idea. However, when Joanna returns to the future she finds that banks have been replaced with co-operative societies, and things are different in many other ways too (elderflower cordial in her fridge and not Chardonnay, etc.). She goes back in time again, and on this occasion misplaces the board game, returning to see an angry banker annoyed at comments about “Monopoly money”.
Apart from the fact that none of this ever convinces, it feels like something written after a chattering classes dinner party in 2008 (something not helped by a reference to the bankrupt Toys R Us chain of stores).
Aeaea by Robert Gordon5 has a man waking up in a body that isn’t his, and doing a manual engineering task while watched by robot guards. The next day he finds himself in a different body with a different job, and so on. Most of the rest of the story follows the standard ‘person in an enigmatic situation figuring out the nature of their reality’ template, and this is well enough done with the unravelling of the puzzle proceeding in an engaging way amid a convincing atmosphere of oppression.
Unfortunately it all rather falls apart at the end when (spoiler) the narrator and the other imates revolt, initially stopping work and then organising an escape. A computer then appears and implores them to stay, but fails: they to break out into an apocalyptic landscape and are rescued by a shuttle from a nearby spaceship. There is some further exposition about the ship being lost, the absence of star maps etc., but the planetbound computer is never convincingly explained, nor is the body switching, nor why a star going civilisation has humans doing manual manufacturing work overseen by robot guards.
This is worth reading for the first three-quarters or so but it’s broken by the ending.
Jammers by Anton Rose opens on a gritty urban estate of the future, in a society of low fertility rates and camera surveillance.
Max’s first jam was on the camera inside the tenement single-room apartment he shared with his mother. Every single-room apartment had one installed, and their metallic eyeballs followed the residents, documenting every movement. Always recording.
The camera never really bothered Max. He knew what privacy meant in theory, but he had never known it, which meant he never felt its absence. But his mother remembered earlier times, and she regaled him with stories dripping thick with nostalgia. Max often found her crying, and shouting at the camera perched above them, the unknown surveyor. p. 40
After learning to code and hacking into the camera system in the tower block he lives in, Max graduates from running errands for the local Mr Big to working for another gangster. The latter’s team specialises in the car-jacking of automatic cars and the robbery of the occupants.
The final act (spoiler) involves a car-jacking where the passenger is that rarest of things, a pregnant woman. As the group prepare to cash in by selling the child, Max faces a moral dilemma.
This one isn’t entirely convincing (the continual camera surveillance goes nowhere) but there are some signs of promise here.
Paradise Bird by J. S. Richardson is a short vignette about a hermaphrodite asteroid dweller and a visiting male spaceman. It reads like the synopsis of a longer piece, and the editor should have sent this back and asked for that story instead.
One of the two highlights of the issue is Sand and Rust, by W. G. White, which is about a long desert caravan of people who follow a huge machine called the Chaperone in the hope that it will eventually lead them to a promised land called the Halt. Once in every fifty years the machine stops and the ‘First Rider’, the leader of the caravan, must offer themselves to the machine as a sacrifice.
The current First Rider is Enoch, who briefs his successor before he gives himself to the machine:
“Where did it come from?” Kimberly stared at the Chaperone, her raven hair whipping around her shoulders with the winds.
The colossal machine blinked into the night, huge spotlights rotating on its crown.
Hell, Enoch almost said. Or someplace equally sinister. “Did your father not teach you, child?” He rocked back on his chair and sipped on one of Nash’s homebrews. The alcohol burnt his throat as it went down, but worked to dull his senses. A sober man walking into the mouth of a lion was not brave, he was a fool.
“He said we built it.”
“Our forebears did, aye. Or so the rumour goes, at least. They discovered the Halt you see, girl. They discovered Heaven. But God didn’t like that. No, God didn’t like that one bit, so He sent a blight to destroy us before we could get there. The Halt’s for the dead, He says. It’s no place for the living.” Enoch stood and hobbled to the front of his porch. At long last, the Chaperone had stopped. “Perhaps He was right to keep us away, but where’s left for us to go now?” said Enoch. “He made us forget where it is, but the Chaperone knows. The Chaperone takes us there in defiance of God’s word. The Chaperone leads us to Nirvana and we follow, no matter the cost. That’s what they say, anyway. Honestly, girl, if that monster knew where it was going shouldn’t we be there by now?”
“Maybe. Why does it stop?” Kimberly leaned over the railing and swung as low as she could without falling off.
“Knowledge comes at a price. It needs a First Rider to fuel it, to keep it going. Every fifty years, like clockwork, it demands its recompense. One day, dear girl, you’ll be standing where I am now, wondering where your life has gone and what awaits you within that beast.” p. 66-67
Enoch then goes to the machine. When he enters it he finds that (spoiler) it is a mining machine which has been following a route along the bottom of a dried up Pacific Ocean. He also finds a note from the previous First Rider urging him to kill himself, and let the caravan people maintain their faith. The last line implies that this is what Enoch does.
This is an interesting piece, and has at its core a neat idea, but I would rather have seen the longer novelette this is the start of: one that provides the details of the caravan people’s daily life (what do they do for water, etc.?), and the future shock they experience when told the truth.6 White can write though, and his characterisation, progression, and prose are all pro level (although I wouldn’t have called the new First Rider “Kimberly” or described her hair as “raven”. Do they have ravens in this desert world?) I look forward to his future work.
Sleeping Fire by Elva Hills is about a woman called Reas, who is selected to go to one of the sky cities, and meets a man called Benjamin on her way there. When they arrive they are used as donors to treat the long-lived inhabitants. Eventually (spoiler), they rebel, steal a “regen” ship and escape to Benjamin’s village on the surface below. Benjamin is wounded during the escape so Reas puts him in the regeneration chamber before the shuttle crash-lands. The story ends with Benjamin suspended in a halfway state in a damaged regen unit.
This is too fast paced and has too much action for its length, which makes it difficult to care about what happens to any of the characters.
The last story, The Square Fella by Duncan Lunan (Glasgow Herald, 1st April 1989), previously appeared in his own anthology of Scottish SF called Starfield (The Orkney Press Ltd., 1989). This book is the subject of an introductory essay: SF Caledonia: Crossing the Starfield by Chris Kelso, which tells of his discovery of this item in a Glasgow bookshop before going on to describe the contents. There is a note at the end of the article stating that the anthology is to be reprinted by Shoreline of Infinity in June 2018.7
As to the story7 itself, Lunan’s tale tells of a group of scientists who are in the middle of organising a rocket launch from their world when they are interrupted by a hostile representative of the Church. During one conversation, it becomes apparent that their world is not like ours. One of the scientists describes their world to the Church representative:
“Here is our world, as we perceive it: a great bowl, with the life-giving sea at its centre. As we travel away from the sea, the slope grows ever steeper and the air more thin – as you notice.” The visitor had subsided into a chair and was visibly short of breath. “We are only twenty-five miles upslope. Ten miles from here, you could not remain conscious without breathing apparatus. Seven hundred and fifty miles up, we now know, the atmosphere becomes negligible and there is no vestige of life. By long tradition, the four great mountains on the ridges above us are the corners by which the Gods hold up the world, like a great sheet.
“If they released their hold, the sheet would flatten, the air and water spread out, and life would be extinguished. But can we believe that — how can we believe it — when we learn that the ridges are four thousand miles above us; the mountains seventeen hundred and fifty miles higher still; so that most of the Bowl is barren and lifeless.”
“What alternative is there? Are you an atheist, sir, do you argue that the existence of life in these favoured conditions is an accident?”
“No, no, that’s too absurd to consider. But what we must consider is that the world is not shaped as we see it.” p. 95
The scientists’ previous work has led them to a theory that they are just one of several bowls on the surface of a huge spherical world, and the rocket’s flightpath is planned to fly once around it and land on the other side of their own bowl.
When it seems that the Church is planning to use the military to prevent the expedition, the rocket is quickly launched, and the rest of the story tells of pilot’s flight into orbit and what he sees (spoiler: their bowl is one of the sides of a vast cube). Although the show and tell of the second part isn’t quite as good as the setup this is still an intriguing piece and, if there had been a magazine market for them at the time, you can imagine it having been the first story in a popular series.
I’ve spoken about the Cover above and would add that I thought the Interior Artwork and general design was also of a good standard (and better than some other pro and semi-pro mags). There is also three page comic strip, The Beachcomber Presents by Mark Toner:
I’ve never been that keen on comic strips in SF magazines to be perfectly honest but, for the most part, this is an innocuous enough piece about people literally living in bubbles discovering that there are others who are not like them. After they meet these people, it ends with a pious line about embracing the “wonders of diversity”.
Spot the Difference is quite a difficult puzzle by Tsu Beel which I enjoyed completing more than I should have (I’ve blurred out the bottom picture so if you want to do it, buy the magazine):
There are several other non-fiction pieces as well as the one I’ve already mentioned. Unfortunately they don’t get off to a good start. At the very beginning of the magazine is Pull Up a Log by Iain Maloney, an editorial by their departing Reviews Editor, and it starts with a historically myopic passage:
In issue 8½, I wrote about Scottish dystopias, looked into the rising tide of pessimism that was sweeping the nation’s artists and readers. We live in interesting times and the outlook for many is bleak, and our science fiction – as science fiction always has – reflects this. Climate change. Populism. Dictators with nuclear weapons. Terrorism. Disease and mass extinctions. Cheery stuff. p. 3
There appear to be generations of people out there who are unaware that they are living in the best of all possible times. Even if their personal circumstances may not be optimal there have been many recent boons for humankind: huge increases in life expectancy, big reductions in death due to famine, etc. etc. Perhaps they should drag themselves away from social media and read the history of the last hundred years.
Further on there is this:
. . . there’s just so much damn good science fiction out there we need an Asimovian timescale to read it all. And the diversity of it all. Science fiction is no longer the preserve of the spherically-challenged white man in an “I Believe” t-shirt: women, BAME writers, LGBTI authors, SF in translation. It’s all over the book shops and all over our screens. p. 3
I wasn’t aware that the SF field ever was the “preserve” (according my dictionary an “exclusive area of activity”) of “the spherically-challenged white man”, or at least not since Clare Winger Harris turned up in 1926.2 As it happens the last magazine I read was the October 1942 issue of Unknown Worlds and it features the by-lines of Jane Rice, Babette Rosmond, Ruth Stewart Schenley, and C. L. Moore, as well as artwork from Manuel Isip, a Filipino and one of that magazine’s (and Astounding’s) regular artists (as was his brother and fellow artist Rey Isip).
Further, by the time I started reading SF magazines in the mid-seventies there were many female writers (including multiple award and multiple-award winners), and at least a handful of black ones (including another multiple-award winner), and the first Native American writer I was aware of, Craig Strete. If there weren’t any identifiably gay writers it was, if memory serves, because not many were openly out at the time.
I also owned two anthologies of translated fiction by Maxim Jakubowski, as well as an earlier volume of Soviet SF, possibly others. Alien (1979) had Ripley, a strong female protagonist. I could go on at great length (and usually do).
I realise that my comments probably look like over-zealous nit-picking for what is probably a casually written piece, but this kind of ill-informed stuff gives a distorted view of the field’s history.
Oh, and if the writer is so committed to the diversity he champions he may want to reconsider the language he uses. Would he refer to a “fat black woman” as casually as he does a “spherically-challenged white man”?
Moon: Flash Fiction Competition is a self-explanatory notice.
Interview: Ada Palmer by Eris Young is an interesting conversation with the writer and historian with nuggets like this:
The way we decide who should be envied or admired shifts historically. In medieval times what you admire in a woman – piety, how much time she spends interacting with the church – is not what our celebrity magazines admire about women. When I talk to people who comment on XYZ attribute of a positive future, whether it’s Terra Ignota or another, being implausible, they’ll often cite, human nature is X – often with a component of, people will always selfishly want to get rich. And the answer is, so long as getting rich is an enviable state, some people will. There will still be people who will work really hard to get what’s enviable, but what’s enviable will not necessarily always be the same. p. 107
Noise and Sparks: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Genre by Ruth E. J. Booth is a short but interesting article about how mainstream writers fear their novels being pigeonholed as SF (I think—it is responding to another article I haven’t read).
There is a readable Reviews section, but some of them could do with being a bit shorter (the ones that are closer to a single page seemed the right length).
Multiverse is the title given to a section of poems and illustrations. There are two poems by Caroline Hardaker: I didn’t understand the first one, and the second did not do anything for me (this latter effort seemed a morbid piece about her grandmother and organ/body donation). Ken Poyner’s poem was a mystery to me too.
There are three illustrations by Elizabeth Dulemba. This is my favourite of the three (although the second runs it close):
In conclusion I would say that there is enough here of interest to make this issue worth your time. ●
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1. There do not seem to be any reviews at the places I would expect: SFRevu, TangentOnline, etc. Are any review copies sent out?
2. The masthead shows multiple office holders:
3. You can see the covers at the magazine’s ISFDB page. I liked #2-#6 as well as this one.
4. What really happened when I went to the Shoreline site to get a copy was that their Paypal payment page asked me to enter my name, address, email, telephone number, inside leg measurement, etc.: I revolted and sent an email of complaint to the magazine asking why they needed all this detail. The editor kindly replied with a copy of the magazine and has since modified the system. Having been back I still don’t know why they need your name and email address for Paypal payments (don’t they get this from them?) or a 12-character password for a shop account (are they running a nuclear reactor off the back end of their server?) but, if still not one-click, it is a lot better than it was and didn’t prevent me from buying a subscription.
5. Gordon’s story has a number of em-dash errors. In one sentence the copy editor has managed to get the first dash correct and the second one wrong:
One – I inhabit a technological simulation- a virtual reality. p. 25
I would have thought that the copy editors would have had a global search and replace function set up to replace these.
6. White’s story is the type that caused me most angst when I was editing myself (Spectrum SF, 2001-2003) as it one that I would have wanted major revisions on. In this kind of situation you would tell the writer that there was definitely a publishable story somewhere in their submission, detail the major revisions you wanted and add that, although you couldn’t guarantee to accept the result, you’d read it with a sympathetic eye, be prepared to work on it with them, etc., etc.
What I think the writers really heard when they got their baby back was, “If you cut off its legs and sew them on where the ears are, I may read it again. If I can be bothered.”
7. The ISFDB page for Starfield. The reprint is available at the Shoreline of Infinity site (print only it seems). This is a scan of the cover from my 1989 edition (review in the future hopefully):
8. There are more typos in Lunan’s story (probably introduced at the OCR stage—I hope the reprint of Starfield has been more carefully proofread). On p. 94 “corners” is “comers”, there is an open and not a closed quotation mark after an em-dash two-thirds of the way down on p. 96, and, perhaps the most unfortunate error, “It was the last chance to burn him with his knowledge.” on p. 104 appears as “It was the last chance to bum him with his knowledge.” Perhaps that last one isn’t a typo but part of the diversity agenda in the editorial. ●
This magazine is available at Shoreline of Infinity, Amazon UK/US (print), Amazon UK/US (digital).
