Panelists Alexan- dra Christo (left) and Lesley Glaister (right) discuss the mythical creatures and figures in their fantasy at Cymera Festival in June 2019
In 2018, Rebecca Wojturska founded Haunt Publishing to publish diverse and inclusive gothic, horror and dark fiction in all formats and role-playing game publisher Dungeons on a Dime was also launched. In early 2020, spoken word theatre company In The Works and audio production studio Tin Can Audio collaborated on Folxlore, a loosely connected anthology of Glasgow-set queer audio horror stories. Later that year, Scotish BAME Writers Network launched Metaphors for a Black Future workshops with a focus on futurist thinking and practices. The network published the first Metaphors for a Black Future zine, edited by the workshops’ curator Martha Adonai Williams, last spring. Scotland is also home to many established and emerging speculative fiction authors. Mike Calder, owner of 25-year-old Edinburgh bookshop Transreal Fiction, which sells science fiction, fantasy and related books and merchandise, agrees with Landmann that speculative fiction “seems to be on an up in Scotland at the moment”. He expands: “We’ve always had big names like (the late) Iain Banks and Alasdair Gray, alongside authors such as Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, Hal Duncan, and Neil Williamson. But there are also newer authors like Laura Lam, Elizabeth May, Caroline Logan and K M McKinley.”
SEVENTH HEAVEN
The first volume in Lam and May’s feminist space opera duology, Seven Devils (published by Gollancz in 2020), was a Sunday Times bestseller and its follow-up, Seven Mercies, was released last month. The latest title from MacLeod, who is the award- winning author of 18 novels as well as novellas, short stories and poetry, is also a space opera. Beyond the Hallowed Sky (Orbit), the first installment in the Lightspeed trilogy, published in November 2021. Earlier that year, Polygon Books published the neo-gothic novel Bittherhall by prize-winning Scotish author Helen McClory.
Up-and-coming speculative fiction authors
include Anna Cheung, a gothic-horror poet based in Glasgow, whose début collection, Where Decay Sleeps (Haunt Publishing), was published in October 2021. In the same month, Birlinn brought out Blood and Gold, the début novel from award-winning narrative artist Mara Menzies, who draws on her Kenyan/Scottish cultural heritage to explore contemporary issues through legend, myth and fantasy. In addition, Rachelle Atalla’s début speculative fiction novel The Pharmacist (Hodder) is due out in May.
Luna Press has just released novella, The Queen of the High Fields by Rhiannon A Grist, a Welsh writer living in Edinburgh, which is pitched as a “folk dark fantasy”. Luna Press will also publish Lorraine Wilson’s second novel, The Way The Light Bends, described as a story of dark fantasy and folklore set in Scotland, this August. Another exciting new speculative fiction voice is Hannah Kaner, a Northumbrian writer who works in Edinburgh. Her début fantasy novel, Godkiller ,was pre-empted in 2021 by HarperVoyager and will hit bookshelves in March 2023. Considering what makes Scotish speculative fiction stand out, Landmann concludes it is “chiefly its liveliness and inventiveness”. She cites Leith resident Harry Josephine Giles’ science fiction verse novel writen in the Orkney dialect, Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador), as an example of this and adds: “I’ve noticed that more and more books are set in a supernatural or dystopian Scotland, such as T L Huchu’s The Library of the Dead, C F Barrington’s The Wolf Mile and the forthcoming Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro.”
With so much compelling writing coming out of Scotland, as well as a range of platforms where it can be celebrated, it looks like the country’s speculative fiction will only continue to flourish.
Transreal Fiction on Candlemaker Row is Edinburgh’s only bookseller special- ising in science fiction and fantasy
07
Photography: Chris Scott
Photography: Chris Scott
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8
