Runalong The Short Shelves - Parsec #14

Publisher - PS Publishing

Price - £5.99 ebook via https://pspublishing.co.uk/parsec-digital-magazine---issue-1-5203-p.asp

For this short fiction trip we head to Parsec’s latest edition and a very fine collection of stories await often taking some interesting swerves to surprise us.

The Last Ambassador by Dave Hutchinson initially seems very grounded in the near future SF for which this author is rightly praised. We visit the extremely small kingdom of Stravia and we focus on Frank the U.K. ambassador for whom we soon realise has the unenviable of trying to make the UK interesting to other countries. From the initial scenes of Frank doing his own cooking it feels realistic and then we get via secret messages the story no one wants to hear the Americans are coming. Again this sounds prescient and what we hear about where the country is may not be surprising predictions either. All of which sets up secret messages, a touch of espionage that even for a mall country with a reputation for not causing trouble feels disruption is incoming fast. Then Hutchinson having laid this table sweeps the tablecloth off on ine one move and the story goes in a very different direction and yet all the other elements still fit. How far would you go for a quiet life? I loved this one!

The Big Outside by Anne Charnock both had some big SFnal ideas but is also in dialogue with SF itself. We go to a ruined earth where the extreme warm climate drive humans to buidomes and people keep trying to see if it possible to leave but the gear of the unknown holds everyone back. Charnock looks at the psychology of people for whom wind and horizons would be in some ways now alien and it’s about a group of people afraid to push themselves . At the same time people keep talking about those who left the planet and no doubt having a better life. Charnock intriguing resolution of this conflict lies in the power of the group’s storytellers and the message applies as much to the far future as now - no easy answers await and perhaps we need to put comfortable stories to bed.

Tending To The Tree of My Mother by Teika Marija Smits is a wonderfully strange tale of a daughter and her mother the latter who we meet in a tangle of limbs within a hospital ward now shaped as a tree. This story walks us to how we get there and initially seems far more domestic as our teenage narrator finds her mother having an affair and watching her parent’s marriage break up. A tragedy strikes and yet this story isn’t one of pure judgement it’s learning to see parents as not simple flawless beings but people with their own wants and desires that we may not immediately want to know about. It’s a fascinating tale of understanding and learning to accept people will always be people.

Skrik by Adam Roberts is a stunning sharp corkscrew of a tale with several ways to read it. Our narrator an English literature academic gets a mysterious email apparently from the future asking her to take an image of a page on a book. The name sounds similar to her boyfriend’s but not one she recognises. Roberts makes us ponder what we would do if this happened, then expands onto the ways we could say this evidenced time travel and what the potential dangers of such a loop of causality means for us now. A fascinating explanation for the 21st century! Then our narrator starts to worry about how reality may need saving and this is where the story goes dark and surprising but lays all the clues where it may be heading. There are few good outcomes and how you read these events will make you ponder what is really going on, a great story indeed!

The Play of The Ashera Women by Steve Toase is a beautiful slice of folk horror that doesn’t tell us quite where it heads to, a man is searching separately for his missing wife. The only clues re fragments of mysterious fabric are posted to him and suggest her last known potential booking to see a play performed since the plague every ten years by a particular village in the U.K. and so he tries to go himself. It’s ominous, filled with religious undertones and in some ways nods to the most classic of folk horror but then swerves into the truly weird and neatly circled back to those clues. I hugely enjoyed it!

Short and lyrical storytelling awaits in Under A Bleeding Sky by Lyndsey Croal where the Earth appears to have a war of the gods at nights which if you see leads to death as a statue. The end of the world is debated by a family and in a tale of lack of hope there is also beauty in acceptance. A haunting powerful story to savour in just a few paragraphs.

Disruptor by Gary Gibson is a strange tale of death and then resurrection. An academic remembers being hit by a car but is then awakened by a powerful businessman to say centuries have passed and he wants our narrator to share his last work. It’s a neat mystery and uses the past to help protect the future. A neat puzzle box of a tale but also has some familiar sounding adversaries who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

A Frank Exchange of Views In The Library of Man by Michael Cobley images Newtonian monks and a search for a mysterious cog. I didn’t quite click with this tale as one character basically keep expanding the plot. But fans of fusing SF and the almost fantastical historical may have more fun with it.

Then we turn to the non fiction articles

For this editor’s Into The Weeds - Jared Shurin and Anne C Perry explains what happens to books after the editor wants to publish it and a host of other roles and activities get explained really well. Publishing is a hard road!

Then Life In The Fast Lane has Ian Watson talking about his longstanding work on the screenplay for AI - Artificial Intelligence with Stanley Kubrick and how now the academic Filippo Ulivieri has called to him on a new academic work on the film. How history and memory and facts blur is a fascinating story in itself and this is a really engaging piece walking us through Kubrick but also the way memory isn’t quite what we think it is.

A host of great reviews and Booktempting awaits in the very capable hands of Nick Hubble, Juliet E McKenna, Donna Scott, Andy Hedgecock, Jack Deighton, Duncan Lurian, Andrew Hook, Paul StJohn Mackintosh, Mark West, Gary Couzens and Stewart Hotston and I’ve a small pile now that I need to push up my TBR pile. Excellent work all!

Finally the magazine has Andy Hedgecock in conversation with Gary Gibson looking back over 18 novels, teaching themes, influences, contradictions and future stories to come

Well worth getting hold of!