Finished reading: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson 📚
If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).
Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.
And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.
I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.
Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.
Books 2024, 18