Smoothly sailing
The refit is complete, and first tests show that the website is flying like an angel on jet-powered gossamer wings. This means we can continue to add some tasty tales by some talented . . . typists (look it’s too early on a Sunday morning to hone the alliterations – make do).
We have a trio from Glasgow: Ruth EJ Booth, Michael Cobley and Callum McSorley, and from the North-east of Scotland we have Gwyneth Findlay. We welcome our four new SF Caledonians.
Ruth is an academic and a regular on the science fiction and fantasy convention circuit, and readers will recognise her from Shoreline of Infinity Magazine with her award-winning column Noise and Sparks. Ruth is a talented fiction writer, appearing in magazines and anthologies, and here we showcase her story The Honey Trap.
Michael is a veteran writer of space operas, and has been published by Simon and Schuster, and Orbit. His story we present for SF Caledonia, The Intrigue Of The Battered Box, demonstrates his talents in a darker Holmesian mystery set in an alternative historical old Edinburgh.
Gwyneth‘s Theia is a beautifully lyrical fable on how our Moon came into existence – keep an eye out for her future works.
Secret Ingredients by Callum dropped into our submissions pile at Shoreline of Infinity with a fanfare of golden trumpets played by cheeky cherubs back in 2018, and became an instant hit with the sheer power and dexterity of his writing. He’s going far, we thought, and in 2024 he is well on his way to farness, with the release of his first novel Squeaky Clean, which won the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime novel. We’ve published a number of Callum’s SF stories in Shoreline, so do yourself a favour and track them down.
The Intrigue Of The Battered Box by Michael Cobley
They finally found his body in a muddy abandoned brick tunnel siding a mile west of Great Waverley Terminus
Read on…
Theia by Gwyneth Findlay
I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new life.
Read on…
Secret Ingredients by Callum McSorley
I’m a line cook. This is how I became a spy:
I come from a binary solar system. We don’t have what other beings might call day and night.
Read on…
The Honey Trap by Ruth EJ Booth
“What the hell is that?”
The apple looked awful. A piebald runt in red and yellow-green, with a sandpaper roughness around its bear-stub stalk.
Read on…
If you are a published Scottish SF&F writer who would like to join the SF Caledonians, or you want to nominate a writer, you’ll find submission forms on the SF Caledonia website.
Also, we’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, questions. Use the contact form on the website for now, and we are thinking of setting up a discussion gathering place online somewhere. Let us know your thought.
Right — back to gathering the stories for May…
—Noel Chidwick
Editor, SF Caledonia