Infinity Plus is running a special feature on Scottish SF at the eve of the Worldcon, guest-edited by Nova Scotia co-editor Neil Williamson. Neil’s also written a short history of the recent rise of the tartan fantasists, and there are sizable novel extracts from Scotia contributors Hal Duncan, Gary Gibson and Mike Cobley. All these gentlemen produce fine work, but just based on the extracts, Duncan’s Vellum is now on my must-read list:
It’s places like this that you can’t tell where the world ends and the Vellum begins, she thinks. For all its asphalt artifice, for all the wooden mileage signposts scattered along its way, for all that you can look down into the valleys and still see the houses and churches, schools and factories of small towns cradled in the folds, up here reality, like the air, is thinner. The road is just a scratch on the skin of a god; if you came off it, she thinks, if you smashed straight through one of the low wooden fences and shot out into the air, you might crash right out of this world and into another, into a world empty of human life or filled with animal ghosts.
But those aren’t the kind of world she’s looking for, not by a long shot.