Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available to 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 E.M. Faulds and the story "Love, Scotland".
About the author:
E.M. Faulds is an Australian who now calls Scotland home. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and a little bit of horror. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Shoreline of Infinity, and ParSec magazines, and Best of British Science Fiction 2022. In 2023, Under the Moon: Collected Speculative Fiction won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. She has edited two anthologies for the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle, the latest of which, Gallus, will be launching at Worldcon 2024.
E.M. on the story:
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic philosophical short fiction, has been talked about a lot lately. I admit, I wasn’t thinking about it when I first wrote "Love, Scotland". But I am now.
‘Omelas’ is a utopian city. The story’s narrator suggests we readers could not accept such a thing readily, so proposes a scapegoat child who must pay for everyone’s peace and comfort with a life of misery. Some who come to know of the child’s existence choose to leave this utopia, unable to reconcile with the cost. Others stay and try to forget it exists.
That’s quite a reductive summary, but it holds the essence of this aspect of human nature I wanted to explore in my own story: we turn our faces away from things we don’t want to see. We accept (far too readily sometimes) that our comfort comes at a cost to others. Out of sight is out of mind. I did not set out to write an Omelas response piece, but I suppose, with "Love, Scotland", I did.
Each of us is haunted in one way or another by the firehose of trauma fed to us daily. Climate change, war, disaster, suffering. No matter how much we ignore it, it doesn’t go away. One child alone the cost? It is allegorical, but each of us know there are thousands, or millions of children out there, suffering.
My characters are haunted too. By their past, by their choices. What makes a person leave their home, their family? What could make you?
I’m someone who has trouble unseeing. I wanted change, but I lack the power to build it, so I wrote it instead. I wrote a place where refugees were welcomed instead of shunned, where they were provided food, homes, jobs. Where dangerous waste remediation founds an entire local economy. “Love” — a town somewhere north of Glasgow and west of Edinburgh — a love song to a future Scotland that may never be.
Here, locals and refugees work on being human together. Which is not always easy. They use specially modified mushrooms to break down the great pile of e-waste that plagues their community. It’s hard work, sometimes frightening and dangerous. And, always, with that haunting of what they’ve left behind.
Originally, this story might have been titled, “Meera, Mushrooms, and the Map of Love”. The technology, as much as the social side of this story, represents reclamation – of our world, our humanity, our environment, our souls. The world is scary. The only way to combat it, sometimes, is with hope.
In a way, nothing I have written is fantastical. Scotland has every ability to create a future that resembles the town called Love. In another way, with the challenges of the world today, it is almost impossible to envision. But we could try.
I think over the coming decade or so, we have a lot of facing up to do. In the end, why not do it together?
Hope spreads. So does love.
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