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 Grant Morrison and the story "Peter's Thoughts".
About the author:
Grant Morrison is the author of the New York Times bestseller Supergods. They are also well known for their innovative work in comics, from the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum to acclaimed runs of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Justice League and the X-Men among others, as well as their subversive creator-owned titles such as The Invisibles, Seaguy, The Filth, and We3. In television, they have developed adaptations of their comic series Happy! for Syfy and Netflix, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for Peacock. Their first novel Luda was released in 2022.
Grant Morrison is also an award-winning playwright, a musician, an occult practitioner, and a stray cat magnet. They were awarded an MBE for services to film and literature in 2012.
Grant on the story:
Like most stories, ‘Peter’s Thoughts’ assembled itself from bits and fragments, stray notions, brief musings.
It began with the title, plucked from an e-mail heading after my wife Kristan forwarded a tagged communication from Peter McGuigan, my book agent. ‘Peter’s Thoughts’ sounded to me like the perfect title for… something…
When Neil and Andrew approached me to contribute to a second volume of the prestigious Nova Scotia science and speculative fiction anthology, ‘Peter’s Thoughts’, that free-roaming, nomadic title finally found a lush and fertile patch of ground where it could put down roots and start to expand.
I’ve never thought of myself as a science fiction writer – my work with comic book superheroes, while sharing some imagery and ideas with sf and fantasy, tends towards epic, symbolic, allegorical renditions of ordinary human dramas in a roughly contemporary world – so the offer to create something new in the SF/speculative genre for Nova Scotia felt like an exciting challenge, especially when I decided the idea that the story itself had to be a science fiction anthology in miniature, a holographic shard of the whole!
Thinking about science fiction and specifically Scottish science fiction brought me immediately to the much-missed Iain Banks. I was a massive Banks fan, and his ‘Culture’ books were the only science fiction novels I’d chosen to read in the last 40 years. The character Peter T. Clark in the story is not Banks but I like to think there’s a hint of his spirit there!
And so, the process of assembly proceeded; stray conceptual rocks conglomerating into planetoids, compacted by gravity into a final singular mass. Something about Iain Banks, chatbots, New Worlds sci-fi, Covid, osteo-arthritis, and the ‘fake’ Ossian poems of James Macpherson. Most of all I wanted to talk about the verifiable multiverse, the one that’s all around us, the billions of parallel worlds and flourishing alternate universes, the versions of us that exist in the minds of the people we share this planet with. In every head, a new reality.
From this seething froth of seemingly random, disconnected notions, ‘Peter’s Thoughts’ reared up, fully formed. My cat Korky is responsible for the final line…
Hope you enjoy it!
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