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Scotland in Space
Creative Visions and Critical Reflections on Scotland’s Space Futures
Edited by Deborah Scott and Simon Malpas
With a foreword by Ken MacLeod
Take a bunch of science fiction writers, scientists, humanists and artists, and throw them into a room. Give them a whiteboard, a pile of sandwiches and a pot of coffee. Let’s see what happens.
The result? Scotland in Space!
Contributors:
Pippa Goldschmidt, Alastair Bruce, Sean McMahon, Elsa Bouet, Laura Lam, Beth Biller, Tacye Phillipson, Russell Jones, Catherine Heymans, Matjaz Vidmar
Artists: Andrew Bastow, Sara J. Campbell
Afterword: Colin R McInnes
Edited by Deborah Scott and Simon Malpas
With a foreword by Ken MacLeod
Take a bunch of science fiction writers, scientists, humanists and artists, and throw them into a room. Give them a whiteboard, a pile of sandwiches and a pot of coffee. Let’s see what happens.
The result? Scotland in Space!
Contributors:
Pippa Goldschmidt, Alastair Bruce, Sean McMahon, Elsa Bouet, Laura Lam, Beth Biller, Tacye Phillipson, Russell Jones, Catherine Heymans, Matjaz Vidmar
Artists: Andrew Bastow, Sara J. Campbell
Afterword: Colin R McInnes
- GenresScience Fiction
181 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 25, 2020
This is one of the strangest books I've ever read, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the one hand, it's a genuinely interesting and original concept - on the other hand it costs nearly twice as much as a typical paperback, but only has two readable shortish stories in it.
One of the reasons for the book's odd feeling is that it isn't a straightforward collection of SF short stories. There are three stories (I'll come to the disparity of number later), four short non-fiction pieces, and three pieces of literary criticism based on the short stories. Even though the stories are themselves long for the format, that is still not a lot of material for the price. The oddity also extends to the format of the book itself. Inside it has a stylish layout with clever use of colour. But the cover screams 'self published' - it just doesn't look like like the cover of a professionally produced title.
Let's get onto the content. As you might guess, it is all focused on Scotland - a very reasonable thing to do, given both the historical abundance of Scottish engineers and physicists (think, for example, Watt, Kelvin and Maxwell) and the plans to build a spaceport in Scotland (a location that features strongly here). Starting with the short stories, the first is the best. Welcome to Planet Alba™, is set in a visitor centre at the spaceport in a relatively near future when the first (Chinese) trip to Mars is underway. Visitors experience Mars via virtual reality, and the story gives us a subtle story that both parallels Mars and extreme Earth landscapes and shows the gap between the image of Mars and the reality. As seems to be the standard in this collection, the story feels a bit too long - it's so languid and laid back it almost falls asleep - but it has a lot going for it.
The second story, A Certain Reverence, is more of a far future tale, where different cultures are sending spaceships to an inhabited planet at Alpha Centauri. The hope seems to be that by providing what can feel like a human zoo exhibit, in return, the aliens will give Earth the technology it needs to get itself out of the environmental mess it's in. The pictured future for the Earth seems rather adrift from our increasingly green-minded views - it's the sort of thing that might have been put forward in the seventies - and it feels a little trite that it is, of course, the Scottish ship that wins the aliens over. Also I found the spelling out of different Scottish pronunciations (such as 'heid' for 'head' and 'wasnae' for 'wasn't') a touch too reminiscent of James Doohan's Scotty in the original series of Star Trek (which, conveniently, gets a mention early in the book), but it had some nice ideas.
As for the third story(?) Far, I'm afraid I gave up after struggling through a few pages of near-unreadable semi-visual stream of consciousness. It just didn't work for me. The four factual pieces on getting to Mars, the real colours of Mars (as opposed to the artificial colours we often see in images), life on exoplanets and the multiverse were all interesting, though most felt like they had been written by academics, rather than people who knew how to write for a general audience. As for the literary criticism pieces, I really couldn't see the point. I struggle with this kind of navel-gazing stuff at the best of times, but why you would want to read a piece trying to dissect a story you've just read I haven't a clue. Presumably, had the editors needed to, they could have asked the author what the story really meant - though if they had to, it rather implies the story wasn't very well written in the first place it failed to communicate.
Overall, then, I'm pleased that I got the chance to read Scotland in Space. It's great to see someone trying something genuinely different, and is a highly laudable bit of risk-taking on the part of those publishing it. But it didn't entirely gel for me.
One of the reasons for the book's odd feeling is that it isn't a straightforward collection of SF short stories. There are three stories (I'll come to the disparity of number later), four short non-fiction pieces, and three pieces of literary criticism based on the short stories. Even though the stories are themselves long for the format, that is still not a lot of material for the price. The oddity also extends to the format of the book itself. Inside it has a stylish layout with clever use of colour. But the cover screams 'self published' - it just doesn't look like like the cover of a professionally produced title.
Let's get onto the content. As you might guess, it is all focused on Scotland - a very reasonable thing to do, given both the historical abundance of Scottish engineers and physicists (think, for example, Watt, Kelvin and Maxwell) and the plans to build a spaceport in Scotland (a location that features strongly here). Starting with the short stories, the first is the best. Welcome to Planet Alba™, is set in a visitor centre at the spaceport in a relatively near future when the first (Chinese) trip to Mars is underway. Visitors experience Mars via virtual reality, and the story gives us a subtle story that both parallels Mars and extreme Earth landscapes and shows the gap between the image of Mars and the reality. As seems to be the standard in this collection, the story feels a bit too long - it's so languid and laid back it almost falls asleep - but it has a lot going for it.
The second story, A Certain Reverence, is more of a far future tale, where different cultures are sending spaceships to an inhabited planet at Alpha Centauri. The hope seems to be that by providing what can feel like a human zoo exhibit, in return, the aliens will give Earth the technology it needs to get itself out of the environmental mess it's in. The pictured future for the Earth seems rather adrift from our increasingly green-minded views - it's the sort of thing that might have been put forward in the seventies - and it feels a little trite that it is, of course, the Scottish ship that wins the aliens over. Also I found the spelling out of different Scottish pronunciations (such as 'heid' for 'head' and 'wasnae' for 'wasn't') a touch too reminiscent of James Doohan's Scotty in the original series of Star Trek (which, conveniently, gets a mention early in the book), but it had some nice ideas.
As for the third story(?) Far, I'm afraid I gave up after struggling through a few pages of near-unreadable semi-visual stream of consciousness. It just didn't work for me. The four factual pieces on getting to Mars, the real colours of Mars (as opposed to the artificial colours we often see in images), life on exoplanets and the multiverse were all interesting, though most felt like they had been written by academics, rather than people who knew how to write for a general audience. As for the literary criticism pieces, I really couldn't see the point. I struggle with this kind of navel-gazing stuff at the best of times, but why you would want to read a piece trying to dissect a story you've just read I haven't a clue. Presumably, had the editors needed to, they could have asked the author what the story really meant - though if they had to, it rather implies the story wasn't very well written in the first place it failed to communicate.
Overall, then, I'm pleased that I got the chance to read Scotland in Space. It's great to see someone trying something genuinely different, and is a highly laudable bit of risk-taking on the part of those publishing it. But it didn't entirely gel for me.
June 4, 2021
Ken MacLeod’s wittily titled foreword “Steam me up Watty” (though he was not the first to it, Watt being apparently one of Birmingham’s finest, according to the Birmingham Mail) sets the scene for Scotland’s entitlement to a share in space endeavours while the editors’ Introduction explains the project’s genesis.
The main body of the book has three sections, each with a story specially written for the book, and academic essays complementing or critiquing the points it brings up.
Scotland and Mars has Pippa Goldschmidt’s Welcome to Planet AlbaTM!, set on the eponymous vistor centre next to a launch pad somewhere in the north of Sutherland, where tourists can experience a VR sensation of walking on Mars at a time when the first humans are actually on their way to the Red Planet. Narrator Ali is of Arabic extraction and spent some time working in the US. The story is about loneliness, rootlessness and fitting in. Alastair Bruce’s essay Mars: There and Back Again relates the hows and when of getting to Mars and the latest plans for that. Sean McMahon discusses what colour Mars really is. (Spoiler: not red – in fact it’s a mixture of browns, beiges and orange with the (very) occasional blue sunset or -rise.) Elsa Bouet in Red Journeys: ‘Welcome to Planet AlbaTM'! and the Martian Literary Imaginary assesses Pippa Goldschmidt’s story and its themes among the history of Mars in fiction, Wells, Bradbury, Robinson et al.
Fringe in Space begins with Laura Lam’s story A Certain Reverence which is larded with Scottish words and usages. It’s narrated by Blair Orji. She is part of a Scottish contingent, either scientists or entertainers, to a tidal-locked planet orbiting Proxima Centauri b where aliens (who have already given humans access to all-but-light speed technology) are waiting to be exposed to Scots culture. In Life, but not as we know it: the prospects for life on habitable zone planets orbiting low-mass stars Beth Biller considers how we have identified such planets, their nature and how to tell if they are habitable. Tacye Philippson, senior Science Curator at National Museums Scotland, in Alien collecting: speculative museology, assesses what aliens might consider worth collecting from Earth and from Scotland in particular.
Scotland at the end of the Universe starts with Russell Jones’s story Far, in which an (almost literally star-cross’d) love story is blended in with an Inflation Drive which allows a newly independent Scotland to be transferred across the universe. The appearance of the story is notable for its layout which resembles that of modern poetry at times (unsurprisingly as Jones is a poet) but also for the brightly coloured illustrations of drinks glasses and what looks like microwave background images plus a few diagrams and the word ‘Yes’ rendered in blue in the font used for promoting that result during the 2014 Independence Referendum. In The Multiverse Catherine Heymans explains how cosmic inflation (which describes how the early universe must have expanded, its signature left as the cosmic microwave background,) violates Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity but how an Inflation Drive could indeed be a way of travelling faster than light – except for the problems involved in switching it off. Vatjaz Vidmar’s Of Maps, Love Stories and the Universe describes both fiction and science as kinds of maps delineating connectedness and that bonding in this way (as within or between atoms) may be the universe’s resistance to its own demise by heat death.
Colin McInnes’s Afterword notes that the first person to give a description of rocket propulsion (in 1861; well before Goddard and Tsiolkovsky) was a Scot, William Leitch, from Rothesay, and that Scotland is well to the fore in modern space technology, Glasgow now manufacturing more spacecraft than any other European city, a possible proving ground for the exploration of space both fictionally and in reality.
The main body of the book has three sections, each with a story specially written for the book, and academic essays complementing or critiquing the points it brings up.
Scotland and Mars has Pippa Goldschmidt’s Welcome to Planet AlbaTM!, set on the eponymous vistor centre next to a launch pad somewhere in the north of Sutherland, where tourists can experience a VR sensation of walking on Mars at a time when the first humans are actually on their way to the Red Planet. Narrator Ali is of Arabic extraction and spent some time working in the US. The story is about loneliness, rootlessness and fitting in. Alastair Bruce’s essay Mars: There and Back Again relates the hows and when of getting to Mars and the latest plans for that. Sean McMahon discusses what colour Mars really is. (Spoiler: not red – in fact it’s a mixture of browns, beiges and orange with the (very) occasional blue sunset or -rise.) Elsa Bouet in Red Journeys: ‘Welcome to Planet AlbaTM'! and the Martian Literary Imaginary assesses Pippa Goldschmidt’s story and its themes among the history of Mars in fiction, Wells, Bradbury, Robinson et al.
Fringe in Space begins with Laura Lam’s story A Certain Reverence which is larded with Scottish words and usages. It’s narrated by Blair Orji. She is part of a Scottish contingent, either scientists or entertainers, to a tidal-locked planet orbiting Proxima Centauri b where aliens (who have already given humans access to all-but-light speed technology) are waiting to be exposed to Scots culture. In Life, but not as we know it: the prospects for life on habitable zone planets orbiting low-mass stars Beth Biller considers how we have identified such planets, their nature and how to tell if they are habitable. Tacye Philippson, senior Science Curator at National Museums Scotland, in Alien collecting: speculative museology, assesses what aliens might consider worth collecting from Earth and from Scotland in particular.
Scotland at the end of the Universe starts with Russell Jones’s story Far, in which an (almost literally star-cross’d) love story is blended in with an Inflation Drive which allows a newly independent Scotland to be transferred across the universe. The appearance of the story is notable for its layout which resembles that of modern poetry at times (unsurprisingly as Jones is a poet) but also for the brightly coloured illustrations of drinks glasses and what looks like microwave background images plus a few diagrams and the word ‘Yes’ rendered in blue in the font used for promoting that result during the 2014 Independence Referendum. In The Multiverse Catherine Heymans explains how cosmic inflation (which describes how the early universe must have expanded, its signature left as the cosmic microwave background,) violates Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity but how an Inflation Drive could indeed be a way of travelling faster than light – except for the problems involved in switching it off. Vatjaz Vidmar’s Of Maps, Love Stories and the Universe describes both fiction and science as kinds of maps delineating connectedness and that bonding in this way (as within or between atoms) may be the universe’s resistance to its own demise by heat death.
Colin McInnes’s Afterword notes that the first person to give a description of rocket propulsion (in 1861; well before Goddard and Tsiolkovsky) was a Scot, William Leitch, from Rothesay, and that Scotland is well to the fore in modern space technology, Glasgow now manufacturing more spacecraft than any other European city, a possible proving ground for the exploration of space both fictionally and in reality.
January 14, 2024
A mixed bag of short stories, poems and scientific musings about Scotland’s role in space exploration, which also sort of assumes that aliens from Proxima B have made contact and asked for a group of performers to be sent to meet them (erm, huh?). The hands down worst bit of the collection is a lengthy critical essay of the short (and rather charismatic) novella at the start, about Ali, a summer worker at the Spaceport in northern Scotland. This mansplains most of the story (yes, I know it’s written by a woman) in excruciating detail. Reading it felt like being talked to at by the numerous fans who think conversation consists of telling you about your own research, only in less detail and without realising that they are talking to the author. However, there are also some gems, including Catherine Heymans’ charismatic essay later in the book. Mixed.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews