Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available for pre-order! It celebrates the depth and breadth of Scotland's dazzling science fiction and fantasy landscape from its haunted islands to its transformed cities and everything in between. Jenni Coutts created the gorgeous cover art.
You can order the book on its own, or buy the bundle anthology deal - both from the Luna store.
Today we'd like to introduce you to David Goodman and the story "New Town".
About the author:
David Goodman is a novelist and short story writer based in East Lothian, Scotland. His debut novel, A Reluctant Spy, is out from Headline Books on September 12th 2024. He has been previously published in Clarkesworld and Analog Magazines, but also writes in a range of other genres, from spy novels to space operas. He is represented by Harry Illingworth of DHH Literary. Learn more and subscribe to his monthly newsletter at www.davidgoodman.net.
David on the story:
I grew up in Edinburgh and still live nearby, and one of the first things I learned about the city of my birth was its bifurcated, highly contrasted nature: the chaotic, medieval, ancient Old Town versus the gridded, regular, Enlightenment New Town. But the longer I lived in the city the more I realised it is further divided, especially in the days of mass tourism and deindustrialisation. There's the jewel box Gothic/Georgian stage set of the city centre, a perfect Instagram backdrop and playground for the arts, which includes both the Old and New Towns. But there's also the rest of the city, where most people actually live, a mixture of housing estates, long-subsumed former villages, industrial estates and mile after mile of pebble-dashed concrete.
I love all four sides of my city - Old, New, Tourist and Local. But I often found myself wondering who was sacrificing what, when, and why, to keep this beautiful city going.
When I came across the story of the stonemasons who built the New Town and the silicosis that killed many of them, often long before their time, I added it to a long tally of such things that I've encountered - grand, incredible things that were a little tainted by the suffering necessary for their creation. And then, because I'm a writer and I think about the future a lot, I wondered what other kinds of sacrifices might be made in the future.
I wrote the first (not great) draft of this story nearly four years ago, but couldn't think of a good way to end it. I got a lot of great feedback from my friends and critique partners, but the story didn't quite hang together right, so I shelved it. Then, a few years later, I decided to try and rework it for Nova Scotia.
When I reopened the file, a new ending suggested itself almost immediately. While the first draft was primarily about the tragedy of the stonemasons and a somewhat bleak extrapolation of the risks of nanotechnology, it didn't really have anything to say about the future, or remembrance, or how we memorialise the tragedies of the past. But it's my hope that the story you're reading now will do justice to those things, while maybe also having a little to say about non-human intelligences and the way they might understand us and try to connect with us. My only hope is that more of us experience that connection like Detective Inspector Gail Slater, rather than the hapless Angus Dalziel.
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