Introduction

This book was born of strange parents; civic pride isn't so unusual, especially for "Blow-ins" as native Bristolians describe anyone who wasn't born around the confluence of England, Wales, and a narrow portion of the Atlantic Ocean (you can have lived ninety-eight out of ninety-nine years of your life in the city and still be a Blow-in), who tend to wax more lyrical about their adopted city than natives.

There's a lot to wax lyrical about; this is the city that gave the world Concorde, the doomed but beautiful Brabazon airliner, the elegant Bristol 410 saloon; Methodism; Massive Attack and Portishead; the SS Great Britain—so ahead of its time it was an SF-nal ship—Clifton Suspension Bridge and other bits of Brunel's relentless innovation, and… Oh I could go on and on, but I won't. Google it, instead.

But when I moved here almost thirty years ago, Bristol—like much of the UK—was going through a crisis of confidence as the old certainties of Cold War and industrialization began to crumble. It became a familiar refrain, that, "We don't actually make anything any more." As if house-bricks and things are all that there is to life.

Well, we do actually make things, albeit things which are hard to measure. Here are some of them.

That brings me to the other, stranger parent; isolation.

Writers work alone, as a rule. Even collaborations tend to be written via e-mail, and the writer's life is a solitary one. For ten years I believed myself to be the only SF writer in Bristol, but that was because I wasn't looking in the right places. Then two years ago, more by accident than design, I attended a convention in Exeter, and met three of the contributors to this anthology.

So the two parents met and spawned this anthology. It's a celebration of the city that we moan about but also love. A city that, like British SF, believes in itself again, which is perhaps why it's been picked up by an American publisher, which is appropriate, given that the voyage that saw the discovery of continental America started from Bristol in 1497.

Because the USA, as reflected in its SF, is experiencing a similar crisis of confidence to that felt by Britain in the latter half of the last century, as the old certainties falter before an emerging Asia and a resurgent Russia. British SF shows that crises can be surmounted. It took us a long time to recover from the loss of Empire, but there's a renewed buzz, even a swagger in British SF. We're looking forward, not back.

But this book is also a flare sent up to any other writers working in isolation; here we are, come and find us. We're over here!

The contributors in this book come from all sectors, TV tie-ins to epic fantasy, short-stories, and novels. There are award-winners and debutants, all coming together to celebrate the city that is—or was, in some cases—their home or work place.

Here are some of the things we make.

Colin Harvey

Isambard’s Kingdom

By Liz Williams

The sphinx smiles down at me, flexes an immense paw. Above, one of the new airships floats overhead, serene as a god. I am standing at the entrance to the bridge, looking out across sparkling mist, waiting. The hem of my robe—the white and crimson of a Welcomer—snaps in the breeze. I lean a little more heavily on my iron staff and smile back at the sphinx. In the reflected metal of the panelling on the tower, our faces are not unalike: broad, dark, patient.

My name is Olaudah Jea. I do not know the sphinx’s name, for such things are guarded carefully. I call her Left Hand. She sits on the left hand tower, staring into the mist and occasionally, one supposes, conversing with her Right Hand companion.

The mist is glittering, a sign of imminent arrival. I tap the iron shoe of my staff against the iron strut of the bridge, producing an echoing clack. Patient I may be, but sometimes things need to be speeded up a little.

“Mr Kingdom!” I cry. I don’t mean to order him around—experts must be respected—but he is like all scientists, prone to wander off into a haze of speculation, diagrams scribbled on the backs of envelopes, on table tops, on bridges. “Mr Kingdom!”

And after a moment, an answer comes.

The Guerilla Infrastructure HOWTO

By John Hawkes-Reed

I was making a charge up the Gloucester road when a dozy sod in a BMW hybrid pulled away from the kerb without looking. If I’d been alert, I’d have spotted the twitch of the front wheel as the driver spotted a gap in the traffic and started to pull out. However, the cycle path and bus lane there funnel into a single uphill section with everything else, and the only safe course of action is to get out of the way as fast as possible. Usually.

There was an ugly sideways lurch as his front wing collected my rear wheel, a flash of grey sky and some Horfield rooftops, and then a thud as I hit the road. I lay there while competing thoughts of Bastard and That's going to be expensive fought for space with Get up and belt him with your U-lock before it starts to hurt.

A head with a Bluetooth earpiece and a collar and tie loomed over me.

"Are you alright ma... Oh, shit. Sorry love."

Wanker.

I ignored his hand and put a dent in the bonnet of his car as I levered myself upright. I took inventory as the driver jabbered on. The rear wheel on the bike was comprehensively shagged, but that looked like all the damage. I was going to need a new pair of combats and wouldn't be wearing short skirts until the road-rash on my left hip healed. It was my own stupid fault for not concentrating.

After the Change

By Stephanie Burgis

Andrew still remembers the first time it happened: the wings bumping out beneath his stroking fingers, then exploding in thick, white glory from Neve’s delicate shoulder blades. The muscles suddenly bulking out her slender arms. Neve’s eyes filling with tears and panic.

“What’s happening to me?”

He held her through the change, and after. She wept in his arms as he looked at the room around them, full of broken furniture and glass.

“We’ll figure this out,” he promised her. “Together.”

He was the one who spent weeks on the Net until he finally found the others, hidden behind password-encoded screens. He was the one who held her hand as she made the phone call, and drove her to the first meeting, at midnight, in the abandoned warehouse behind Temple Meads that the others had taken as their temporary headquarters.

Empty buildings hulked around them in the darkness, left over from a more prosperous decade. The distant rattle of the trains passing through the Temple Meads Nexus mingled with the sound of Neve’s quick, shallow breathing.

She clung to his hand as the door opened. A man’s wide figure blocked the light from inside, his shoulders freakishly enlarged, bulging with more muscle than any bodybuilder could dream of. He looked at Andrew with eyes that shone golden through narrow slits. “No normals,” he growled.

Neve shook her head and backed up, pulling Andrew with her. “I can’t do this alone,” she whispered to him. “I can’t—”

“It’s okay,” Andrew said.

A Tale of Two Cities

By Christina Lake

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” I began. No one reads Charles Dickens any more, so I thought I could get away with it. “It was the age of the Internet, it was the age of Aquarius, it was an epoch of waste, and an epoch of high environmental principles. It was a season of darkest terror and a season of brightest freedom.”

That’s the point where my sister would usually say: “Get on with it, Syd!” But my audience, a delegation from one of the new fractal nations, was respectful. Maybe they really wanted to hear what life had been like back in 21^st century Bristol?

“In those days, Bristol was a city of two halves,” I said, “split down the middle by a great road where the M32 building now stands, and divided politically by the battle between those who still loved their motor cars, and those who wanted to ban them. Petrol was running out, and while the rich could buy vehicles that ran on other fuels, the poor still queued up for their ration. The Bristol First party had just defeated the old political parties in the local elections and was determined to make the city one of the wealthiest and most prestigious in the country. Their only opposition came from the eco-activists who still dreamed of a carbon-neutral Bristol.”

The fractals nodded dutifully, even though they probably knew all this from their own research.

Trespassers

By Nick Walters

Crouching uncomfortably in the bushes at the edge of the Avon Gorge, Simon wished—not for the first time—that they'd gone to the pub instead.

Matt was fiddling with his camera.

"What are you doing?"

"Just putting in some fresh," Matt whispered back.

Simon glanced around. Everything was quiet, which was just as it should be; it was gone two o’clock on a Wednesday morning. To his left, shining through the leaves and branches above him, the lights of the Clifton Suspension Bridge picked out the structure of the famous landmark in bright orange blobs. It looked close enough to touch. In front of him, the main road—Sion Hill—led up towards Clifton Down, and in the other direction past the Avon Gorge Hotel and down into Clifton itself.

"Ready," said Matt, tossing the dead batteries into the bushes. Simon frowned. Sometimes his friend seemed to have no respect for the environment, for history, or anything much.

The sound of a car engine alerted Simon to danger; he retreated further into the undergrowth, and listened in apprehension as a vehicle—out of sight from their hiding place—braked outside the hotel. A sudden burst of voices, a girl’s shrill laugh, horribly loud in the stillness.

Pirates of the Cumberland Basin

By Joanne Hall

The woman’s body splayed against the glass dome of the abandoned shopping centre. Sliced from throat to pubic bone, flaps of skin stretched out on either side of her torso, throwing a silhouette like a gigantic bat against the glass. Looking up, Harry saw where she struck the dome, a spider web of cracked glass, and a long smear of blood as she slid to her final resting place.

“Berkley, can you get closer?”

His partner said nothing, overwhelmed by the grim spectacle of the Circus. He lowered the paddle into the murky water, propelling them forward. The only sounds were the soft splashing as the dinghy inched through the Circus, and a persistent dripping from all around, echoing in the stillness.

Harry fixed his eyes on the dead woman, preferring that macabre sight to the half-submerged, abandoned shops around him. As Berkley swung the torch, he could still make out some of their names, faded and water-ruined. He tried not to imagine what they might have sold. That was a world long gone.

The dinghy struck something underwater and came to an abrupt halt, the stern swinging round sharply. The woman’s body loomed twenty feet above, pale and distorted in the wavering torchlight. “Now what, Harry?”

Harry wasn’t sure. He had to take a sample so InfoCon could find out who she was, tell her family. If she had a family, if she wasn’t an illegal, travelled thousands of miles for a better life only to end up as a gory window display.

THERMOCLINES

Colin Harvey

Lightning flashes in the distance and fear rises like a bubble from the bottom of a stagnant pond. I flap my wings harder against the headwind I’ve been fighting since leaving the Irish Sea, but terror weighs my muscles down. If I hadn’t left it so late and the wind hadn’t picked up, I’d be home by now. If, if. If the wind hasn't swung round so I’ve flown past the village in the dark without realising.

When the rain hits, it’ll weigh down my wings until I can no longer fly. You’re going to die far from home, the fear says. You’re going to ditch in the Grey; your lungs will fill with that burning smog, your skin will blister, your flesh bubble, and no one will know what happened to Garyn Jenkins.

“Bloody wind!” I shout with breath I can hardly spare. “Bas-tard rain! Bloody thermoclines! Bloody, bloody Grey!” Anger at the legacy of our ancestor’s folly lends me fresh wind.

Then the darkness deepens enough for the candle-trees to ignite, lighting up the familiar valley ahead. As their fiery berries brighten, I shout with joy, and tears of relief half-blind me. The trees will burn for an hour, long enough for me to get home. Unless I hit a thermocline.

Tonight, though, I manage to avoid any of the lethal temperature inversions. By the time I reach Pembroke Trees, fear is a distant memory. Instead I think, I’ve flown at night, and lived!

What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?

By Gareth L Powell

Bobbie's face lit up. "Hey, did you ever see that film with Nicholas Cage, the one where he's a cop and he promises that if he wins the lottery, he'll split his winnings with the diner waitress because he can't afford to tip her?"

I scratched my eyebrow. "Yes, I think so. Was the waitress Michelle Pfeiffer?"

"I don't know, I think it was Bridget Fonda. But anyway—how about we have the same deal? I bought you a coffee, so how about if you win the lottery, we split the prize money?"

"Sure, why not?" I shrugged my jacket off and hooked it over the back of the chair.

"You promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

She sat back. "Okay then."

She took another sip of tea. I tried my coffee. It was too hot to drink, so I took the plastic lid off again and sniffed the steam. Bobbie was watching me. She said: "Do you go clubbing much?"

I shook my head. I was thirty-three. I hadn't been in a nightclub for years.

"Only there's this party tonight at Evolution, and I don't really have anyone to go with, and I thought you might—"

She stopped talking, distracted by something over my shoulder. There was a commotion going on outside. I saw people running up the street in the rain, their feet splashing. The traffic had stopped. People were getting out of their cars. I turned to Bobbie. She was looking past me and her eyes were wide.

"John?" she said.

I swivelled on my chair. There was something huge coming up the road. It towered over the buildings, a billowing tsunami of dust and greyness a hundred metres high, bearing down on us with horrifying speed.

The Sun in the Bone House

By Jim Mortimore

The bridge at Briggstowe, little more than a platform of rough-hewn wooden poles held together by crudely woven rope, sweats living green beneath a perfect summer sky. Under the bridge, sun-barred, an intermittent gush of brown water slops and eddies.

It is late summer and the air is fogged with pollen.

A child is playing on the bridge. Muddy, naked, no more than eight summers, she throws berries from a pile she has gathered into the river. She has as many berries as fingers. The berries hit the water in slow procession. Droplets of water fly. Something pinksilver and wriggling darts away from the ripples into the shadows of the far bank. The child giggles. Another berry hits the water. The child laughs.

The river throws the berry back.

The child gapes.

The fruit hangs dripping beside the bridge, no more than an arm’s length from the child’s face. Trickles of water run from the berry, upwards into the air. The child can see her reflection—red hair, green eyes—tunnelled shrinking through every perfect drop. The river boils. The pinksilver wriggling thing erupts from the surface. A salmon, scales iridescent in the sunshine, eyes and mouth gaping. It hangs suffocating in the rose-scented summer air.

Fruit and fish drift higher. The child looks up.

The sky splits open like a wet paper toy and the future falls through.