TTA website

John Grant. Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie?

Whereas Science Fiction uses alien landscapes into which human's are placed, the speculative fiction of TTA uses less distant locales - here the city of Edinburgh is the setting, in which the visiting protagonist finds himself strangely unsettled. The nameless character is fleeing the bereavement, the death of his girlfriend. She is in his thoughts and in his dreams (to the extent of nocturnal emissions). However, a chance meeting with a young woman, the Kristie of the title, begins to pour balm on his wounds. The story climaxes (!) atop King Arthur's Seat, the volcanic plug outside the city of Edinburgh. I joined him in a dizzying denouement, primarily due to having a flashback to the vertigo attack which forced me back down said mountain a couple of years back.

Well written, and ineffably mainstream, with only the minor matter of whom the young Kristie is/was being the specluative element.

Jeremy Minton. Nails.

Ah, much more to my taste - some good old fashioned SF. Or, to be more accurate, some good new fashioned SF, a piece of action which could have been pulled out of an Alastair Reynolds space opera. The setting is a near future Earth in which a steely eyed terrorist is evidence of the impact the technology of long-dead alien vistors, the Staaln, has made. More precisely, it is a church displaying what purport to be the very nails which were driven through the hands and feet of Christ, retrieved from ancient history by a Staaln time net. And it is those which are to be stolen by a small team with Staaln tech at their disposal.

The heist goes badly wrong though, when the tech proves more (much more!) than simply being a distraction : small nanotech embeds itself in human bodies and becomes .... things of nightmare...

Damian Kilby. Pictures on a Cafe Wall.

The dragons of another worlds offer an artist the chance to escape from domestic disharmony (marital strife rather than the bereavement of the first story). Little do the visitors to the art gallery in which his work is displayed know of that which he has see.

Daniel Kaysen. The Opposition.

Al and Ray's Open til Late is a 24/7 cafe in which the owner, Al, and his assistant, Ray have been dishing up food for a quarter of a century. The years have been marked by Ray's odd flashes of prescience related to doom - not the run of the mill 'oh-oh here comes trouble', but a cast-iron certain knowledge of imminent death. You just know that bad things are going to happen to Al when he leaves with a young woman who has happened by the restaurant. And they do. And for Al, another of his moments suggests that it will be he who is waiting for the knock at the door...

Joel Lane. Facing the Wall.

Domestic divorcal disharmonies feature in this short story, in which a cop is driven to go deep undercover to find a serial sado-murderer. We find out that he can spot the woman next door faking her orgasms - but not through having sex with her, but through pressing his ear to the adjoining wall and listening to her having sex, but from there on in it is a quick descent into the darker depths of Birmingham and the darker depths of his soul. And it his soul which he surrenders.

Al Robertson. Golden.

Against the backdrop of a struggling relationship, and in settings particularly well known to this reader (Museum Tavern, NFT, Southwark, Clapham Common) a young man finds that there is a different world, a slightly different world, in which the past, present and future have just a little more to offer.