A Son of the Rock

Gollancz, 2018, 324 p, plus ii p Acknowledgements.

That I have read Newman’s Planetfall sequence in the wrong order (3,4,2,1 to be precise) doesn’t really matter that much as they can all be read as stand alone titles. Here, we are in the years after an expedition to another planet under the guidance of a woman called The Pathfinder in search of God. On landing the expedition’s members found what is now called God’s city. This is an “organic citadel” like a “huge forest of baobab trees tangled round one another,” and, when hot, grows tendrils to manage the heat.

The story is narrated by expedition member Renata Ghali (Ren,) the settlement’s 3D printer engineer, whose later revelation to be a hoarder whose home pod is piled with rubbish stolen from the settlement’s recycling machine, the Masher, is an indication of possible unreliability. She is troubled by fellow expedition member Cillian Mackenzie (Mack,) whose resolve held the community together after the Pathfinder did not return from a foray inside God’s City, saying she was “communing with the creator,” and telling them all to await her return. What has evolved in the colony in the years since is in effect a cult.

Some time after The Pathfinder’s disappearance, other members of the original expedition were lost elsewhere on the planet. Plot kicks in when a lone outsider called Lee Sung-Soo, a survivor of those lost colonists, who is also The Pathfinder’s grandson, turns up at the city.

Ren’s obligations to Mack take her inside God’s city, a strange unsettling place where perspectives shift and passageways can suddenly change orientation. Her explorations lead her to wonder whether the colonists are the first or if there have been previous visitors to the planet; visitors who could only have been alien.

As things unfold we discover what actually happened to The Pathfinder inside God’s city, the revelation of which to the colony has ramifications for Ren, Mack and the settlement as whole.

Newman’s writing is not in question. She is particularly good on Ren’s mental disintegration.

The integration of religious elements with an SF setting is a little awkward though.

Pedant’s corner:- Printed in USian, bacteria (the word is treated as if it’s singular – but that would be bacterium,) outside of (x 2: just ‘outside’; no ‘of’,) “none of them satisfy me” (none of them satisfies me,) “in the opposite direction of God’s city” (it’s ‘opposite direction to’ not ‘opposite direction of’.) “None of them were looking at me” (None of them was looking at me.) “None of them are good” (None of them is good.) “None of them are paying attention” (None of them is paying attention,) “neither of them say anything” (neither of them says anything.) “None of them are listening” (None of them is listening,) “our species’ capacity” (species here is singular; so ‘the capacity of our species would be better.) “None of them are familiar” (None of them is familiar.)

I saw in yesterday’s Guardian that Scottish writer Allan Massie has died.

Regular readers will know I have followed his fiction closely: indeed he is one of my sub-category entries under Scottish Fiction. I think I have read all of his fiction works.

You will find my reviews of most of his books on the blog if you search.

Massie was also a journalist and critic, especially for the Scotsman newspaper.

A sad loss.

Allan Johnstone Massie: 16/10/1938 – 3/2/2026. So it goes.

Not quite Dunfermline’s finest but the band launched the career of guitarist Stuart Adamson, later of Big Country fame. Lead singer Richard Jobson became a TV presenter.

Skids: Into the Valley

The Jetty Museum, Windermere, like Blackwell, is run by Lakeland Arts. It covers the hostory of boating on the lake over 2oo years.

We found the contents very interesting, the experience better than we had expected.

The most imposing exhibit when you enter the main part of the museum is the motor launch, Branksome, whose rear is the first bit you encounter:-

Prow of Branksome:-

Tea setting inside Branksome:-

There is also a model of Branksome in a glass case beside a photograph of a hydroplane on the lake:-

Speedboats on wall behind Branksome:-

Glider and speedboat:-

Hanging on the wall just by the entrance door (and seen behind Branksome’s funnel in photo 3 above) is Beatrix Potter’s Rowing Boat:-

In adition to in the Hall and White Room, Blackwell Arts & Crafts House has some other fine fireplaces.

Tree House design by Blackwell’s architect Baillie Scott:-

SPFL Tier 4, The Rock, 31/1/26.

Well, this was a six-pointer and we lost it. So, instead of being 8 points ahead of them with a win or 5 with the draw we are now only two in front.

We started the season ten points ahead due to their fifteen points deduction. They have now made up eight of a difference – and nine of them were against us. They seem to have a hex on us.

We started well enough and had most of the possession and loads of corners. Mark Durnan had a good header well saved by the keeper before we scored. From a corner the keeper only just tipped the ball against the bar and the header back came down from the bar again and fell for Leighton McIntosh to put it in from two yards. Said keeper by the way ought to have been off for continuing to contest his yellow card for time wasting while Leighton McIntosh was gettng treatment for an injury. He must have been at it for at least two minutes moaning at the linesman.

They hadn’t troubled Brent Long in our goal at all then not long before half-time Adam Livingstone was booked for walking into somebody – they fell over at the slightest excuse all game, refs really should be more wise to this – and as a result backed off a challenge in the ensuing attack allowing his man inside where a pass to a free man led to an uncontested shot into the net.

It was all over when they scored again even though there was most of the second half to go.

Yes we did hit the bar twice but that’s what happens when you’re on a bad run.

I would have said Edin City didn’t deserve to win they only had three shots on target all game but they scored twice and we didn’t so they did deserve it.

It now looks increasingly likely we will finish bottom and I can’t see us winning the play-off. It will after all be against a team who will have momentum with them.

New owner Mario Lapointe’s lack of knowledge and instinct for football is costing us big time. The decision to replace sacked manager Stevie Farrell with his deputy Frank McKeown within a day or so is utterly inexplicable.

It’s a more scary time to be a Sons fan now than it was when we were in admin.

Polygon, 2010, 342 p, plus vi p Introduction by Hew Strachan. First published in 1919.

In this third of Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels our hero has been pulled from his General’s post on the Western Front to visit Fosse Manor in the Cotswolds where he is to pose as a pacifist. Among the mostly harmless people he meets there is, however, a Mr Moxon Ivery who will turn out to be more dangerous. Part of the party is Miss Mary Lamington with whom Hannay is very taken and who is the agent from whom he is to accept his further orders. Their mutual knowledge of the Pilgrim’s Progress is to be used as a kind of code book to convey and hide messages (the origin of Mr Standfast’s title.)

Mary’s instructions take Hannay to Glasgow to make himself known in the pacifist working men’s associations and then on to Skye. These northern regions of the country were apparently subject to strict travel restrictions which, as a pseudonymous agent, he has to circumvent. Several escapades among the heather later he has discovered a German spy ring working as the Wild Birds and heard the name Bommaerts.

He relays his information to the authorities in London before being returned to his battalion in Belgium.

Meanwhile his friend Peter Pienaar has joined the Royal Flying Corps and struck up a rivalry with the German air ace named Lensch, who Pienaar says is better than Richthofen. (This gives the excuse for the otherwise not too apposite cover picture.) Pienaar is eventually shot down and badly wounded. Hannay’s other companion in the Erzerum affair in Greenmantle the US citizen, Blenkiron, also makes an appearance. He makes the observation, “There’s something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you’ve civilized them.”

In Belgium Hannay has enough downtime from his front-line duties to go ferreting about a nearby chateau in search of the mysterious Bommaerts, who captures him and boasts of his superior abilities and the devastating blow the Germans will soon strike. Bommaerts, Ivery and a journalist called Clarence Donne who had managed to hoodwink Blenkiron turn out to be one and the same man, the Graf von Schwabing.

Hannay escapes in a very ‘with one bound he was free’ type of way and makes a foray into Switzerland to try to thwart von Schwabing’s designs, making an arduous passage on foot over the Swiss mountains in attempting this.

On his return once more to army duty we are given some fairly detailed descriptions of the German spring offensive of 1918 and, by Buchan’s account, how close it came to complete success. From the point of view of the British Tommy it must indeed have seemed a desperate situation.

Mr Standfast is  a Boys’ Own Adventure kind of enterprise. Plot here is everything, characterisation a secondary concern – if a concern at all. The most engaging character – Mary Lammington is inserted only to give Hannay a love interest but is barely memorable – is a true pacifist who has been inducted into the Labour corps and finds fulfillment there.

Sensitivity note. The book is of its time in its off-hand racist comments. “There are some things that no one has a right to ask of any white man,” “‘a great big buck nigger,’” “‘like a bankrupt Dago railway,’” “a droop like a Polish Jew’s,” “a face like a Portuguese Jew’s,” – this otherwise nameless character is referred to thereafter as the Portuguese Jew – “a Paris Jew-banker,” “he was an Austrian Jew,” “all breeds of Dago and Chinaman, and some of your own South African blacks.”  “‘He is a white man, that one,’” is said by Pienaar of his air adversary Lensch.

Pedant’s corner:- Afrikander (nowadays spelled Afrikaner,) “the Coolin” (several times; nowadays usually spelled, as in Gaelic, Cuillin.) “It seemed to more a stone and to replace it” (to move a stone makes more sense,) “shinning up a rain-pipe” (downpipe is more usual, and  the Scottish term is roan pipe; alternatively, rone,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘and most of my tactics. I had to invent myself.’” (no need for that full stop ‘and most of my tactics I had to invent myself.’) “In the press of a fight once scarcely realizes death” (In the press of a fight one scarcely realizes death.)

Blackwell‘s Arts & Crafts designs extend all over the house.

A bedroom:-

Close-up on bedroom light ftting:-

Another of the beds:-

Bedroom chair:-

Chest of Drawers and bookcase:-

Chest:-

I realised last week that I haven’t featured any Kate Bush tracks beyond Wuthering Heights.

So let’s make up for that. This one only reached no 20 (in 1985.)

Kate Bush: Cloudbusting

Luna Press, 2025, 176 p including Author’s note on Finding Inspiration in Scottish Folklore. Reviewed for ParSec 14.

This is a collection of one novella and 22 short stories – some very short; the title story is barely three pages long, a couple are only two, with the longest, The Frittening, just twelve – all taking inspiration from Scotland’s folklore, superstitions, or landscape.

The short pieces are loosely bunched under headings for the four seasons with each section’s stories prefaced with a wood- (or lino-)cut engraving of one of the Moon’s principal phases and a scene illustrative of a story within it. A ‘Bonus Section’ at the end outlines those particular tales and legends which sparked Croal’s imagination.

An individual story here can contain relatively familiar apparitions or hauntings – selkies, kelpies, hagstones, seer stones, magpies, omens and shape shifting, Will-o’-the-Wisp, the Otherworld, Changelings – but others like the Sluagh, the Frittening or the Boneless, the Cat-Sith, the Ghillie-Dhugh, Baobhan Sith and the Fiddlers of Tomnahurich Hill, the Cailleach, the Nuckelavee, the Marool, the Ceasg, Bee-telling, the Sea-Mither, Each Uisge, the Wulver, the Bride and Angus, may be less so. Some are set in depopulated post-disaster worlds and border on Science Fiction; others touch on gothic, weird horror, dark fantasy, and solarpunk. Many draw stimulus from nature, climate, and the environment, with feminist and eco themes prominent. Croal’s Author’s Note informs us three of her tales do not have a specific derivation but are original to her.

Hence, among others, we have omens in the sky, tappings on windows, a strange puddle emerging on a doorstep, pebbles appearing in a nest in the night, a will-o’-the-wisp manifesting more strongly each day, a fiddler finding his muse in a painting whose scene gradually changes, the green man as a malevolent influence, the thoughts of the last surviving whale as it roams the deserted seas. Except for a common thread of the sea there is little beyond the Gaelic names of the various phantasms to mark these stories out as specifically Scottish.

The novella, Daughter of Fire and Water, with its intermingling of gods/goddesses and mortals in fact reads more like a Greek, or perhaps Norse, myth – except for the prince in it being named Angus.

Taken individually the stories here are perfectly fine but the cumulative effect of Croal’s general style tends to the dry. She has a fondness for italicized paragraphs, especially in throat-clearing beginnings, and there is the occasional odd choice of verb, which can be jarring. There tends to be a kind of distance between the tale and the reader and the stories are too often told rather than shown while some are not really given enough room to breathe fully. There is not much emotion evoked in these tales but then stories of weird creatures and the whole apparatus of fairy tale have always been admonitory in intent.

This is a collection to be sipped rather than quaffed. (Not really an option available to a reviewer.)

Curiously, a few lines on Content Notes and Warnings come dead last in the book though a signal to them does lie on the publishing information page. Surely if such warnings are needed they ought to be more prominently placed?

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- focussing (focusing,) maw (more than once. A maw is not a mouth,) several USianisms (cookies, snuck, dove [for dive,] inside of, etc,) sunk (several times; sank.) “The only muscle the woman moved was her mouth” (a mouth is not a muscle,) razor—sharp (razor-sharp,) sung (x 2, sang.) “She lay the Seer’s map on the table” (She laid the Seer’s map on the table.) “She was his only companion, his confidant” (she; therefore ‘confidante’,) “Then she said with sharp cruelty, ‘no. Not if you…’” (she said with sharp cruelty, ‘No. Not if you…’,) “Everyone knelt and lay the offerings at her feet” (and laid the offerings,) “all that kept me company were layers of clouds” (all that kept me company was ….) “If I wanted so bad not to be alone” (If I wanted so badly not to be alone,) “and lay it over my chest as a pendant” (and laid it over my chest,) “and lay her in blankets” (and laid her in.) “When the sea witch, turned away and disappeared” (doesn’t need the comma, which in fact detracts from the sense,)  “that I’d wove so carefully” (woven,) “mouth scrunched up into an eclipse” (only makes sense if ‘ellipse’ was meant,) a new paragraph that was not indented, a missing full stop, “span” (spun,) “as if expecting me turn into” (to turn into.) “‘Your association with them isn’t exactly customary’” (sense expects, ‘Your association with them isn’t exactly exemplary’,) sat (seated; or; sitting.) “The fall made the landscape blur, and then a screech” (needs clarification,) “there were no sign of burns or marks” (there was no sign.) “then he swept out the room” (as written this means he cleaned the room with a brush; what was intended was ‘he swept out of the room’,) “the hot water stung into my legs” (the hot water stung my legs,) focussed (focused, annoyingly used two pages earlier.) “They looked between one another” (looked at one another,) galivanted (gallivanted.) “Much of these stories are inspired by” (Many of these stories are.) “I became fascinated in the dark, strange, and rich folklore” (became fascinated by,) “rife with unexplained phenomenon” phenomena makes more sense.) “Hagstones are stones with natural holes bored in centre are thought to be,” (the holes can’t have been bored; plus the sentence needs an ‘and’ before ‘are thought’.)