The Early Days of a Better Nation

Thursday, November 04, 2010



'Without the Martians, who would have heard of Woking?'


'The Future Will Happen Here, Too', my apologia for all the catastrophes, wars, revolutions and runaway Stross singularities I've fictionally inflicted on Scotland, has just been published in The Bottle Imp, online magazine of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, in an issue devoted to science fiction and fantasy in Scottish literature.

Highlights of the issue include Stuart Kelly on David Lindsay, Hamish Whyte on the SF poetry of Edwin Morgan, Martyn Colebrook on the dichotomies of Iain (M.) Banks, and Caroline McCracken-Flesher giving a critical take on Scotland as Science Fiction.

All in all, a very welcome acknowledgement and celebration of SF/F as part of the main stream of Scottish literature.

I still feel a little embarrassed at the tally of awful things I've done to Lochcarron.

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7 Comments:

You built a really cool spaceship there, though - that's got to go some way towards making up for it.

Chris Williams

That liveblogthingy seems to delete everything unless you're already logged in. :/

My original post was something like: "Nothing like my old Ars Magica group did to Lewis!"

Thanks for this info/link, Ken, as it looks fascinating!

Chris - yes, I hope so. The inspiration for several of those scenes was actually watching a floating oil-rig being floated out of the real-life version of Kishorn Yard in 1975 or so. You can see the huge semicircle on Google Maps/Earth, here.

Awesome piece of writing unc! Makes me homesick for Scotland :)
Caroline,xx

Aw, Caroline - I sometimes get homesick for New Zealand!

At least Scotland has got some good out of it along with the catastrophes. I often wonder how Stephen King is regarded in Maine, a state which, thanks to forty years of being used as a King setting, now has a demonically possessed car in every garage and a horrifically vampiric chicken in every pot.

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