Mike Adamson

This short story doesn’t suffer from a lack of character development or scene building. It has just the right amount of both. About a two-hour read, the story takes place in a geologically active world that is still in its forming stage. Lava flows constantly and there are frequent earthquakes.

A well-respected computer troubleshooter is sent to the planet to find out what is causing random glitches in the survey team’s central computer. Using proven proprietary diagnostic software, he finds that the problems are being caused by someone. One word keeps popping up in the software readouts, “LEAVE”. At first, the lead geologist is disbelieving of the result but soon finds herself looking at an aberration formed into a human shape by lava. The aberration is waving its arm in a way that indicates that it wants the entire survey team to leave immediately.

The surveyors knew that an ice ball meteor shower was coming but not appreciated was the explosive nature of it. The world’s sentience being, knowing that this water-based species on its surface could not survive such a bombardment, was telling them to leave the planet. Fortunately, the team took heed of the message left the planet just that in the nick of time.

The story was enjoyable, moved quickly, and kept me reading.… (mehr)

Having read at least one good short story by Mike Adamson in the past I bought this as an ebook on special offer a while back and have finally got around to reading it, and I’m sure glad I did.

The lead character is Peter Larkin, a freelance journalist eking out a living with his camera and word processor. Mad for railways and Victorian engineering, he gets a commission to write a piece about a rural line in the peak district of England. While photographing the main line, enjoying ‘the satisfying synthetic clash of the camera’ he notices signs of a spur going off from it into wild countryside. He follows this for a while but night is falling and he has to turn back.

In his hotel, online research into the spur is fruitless but at Buxton library, he finds references to Deakin Valley, a farm village that once existed nearby ‘supplying wool to the great mills of Empire.’ There is information about a disaster on the line and one newspaper mentions a Maggie Townsend who now runs a magic shop in Hathersage. He finds her and she is a very interesting woman indeed.

Paranormal stories require a suspension of disbelief and Adamson achieves this by pulling you slowly from the very well described real world into an unseen one where ‘apparitions of ancients warriors haunted glens and glades, as if the very extremis of their exertions stamped them indelibly upon space and time.’ The prose is fine too. I read this on a stormy Sunday morning and enjoyed every page. A novella this good deserves to be spread far and wide but unfortunately, it’s put out by Alban Lake Publishing who seem to have given up on distribution. You can buy a paperback from their own bookstore but no ebook now alas. https://www.irbstore.co/product-page/last-train-to-deakin-valley-by-mike-adamson
… (mehr)