Giant Squid Creations

This year has been a complicated one. There have been the extreme joys of watching my son in his first year of life, the awe of each new discovery he makes and the ongoing marvel that he is indeed my son and I am a father. Not sure I'll ever get used to that bit but it is fantastic. Then there's been the downsides. The biggest being the loss of my father-in-law to cancer. He battled the disease for over a year and for much longer than was initially predicted. He was a good man and it was good to see him with my son, they got on so well and shared many laughs. I won't say any more about that here, but he is sorely missed in this house. On top of that I was made redundant from a job I'd had for almost a decade. I didn't love the job but losing it so suddenly shook me up and my sense of purpose. As it happened the timing was very good, I was able to be there for my wife when her mother was sick and she had to look after her father. I also got to see more of my son ...

I just read the opening story in Lightspeed No 49, the Women Destroy Science Fiction Special. It's Each to Each by Seanan McGuire . I'm torn over it in a number of ways. It's about a Navy made up of genetically modified women, essentially engineered mermaids, and how the 'modifications' as they're called have unexpected consequences. The women begin to feel non-human, to lose all connection with land dwellers and to have a deep emotional and psychological connection with each other. It's a great idea and well examined in the story which is well written and clearly had an effect on me. As I come to write this next point I realise I'm not as torn as I first thought. The idea of altered humans and the mysteries of the deeps reminded me of pulp age stories and I was thinking of ways it could have worked better in those terms. I was thinking about its atmosphere and how it could have been built up with a greater sense of fear of the unknown - as with the...