A story of ordinary lives against a backdrop of cosmic stakes, Duncan Fraser’s captivating and unique speculative fiction debut Terrarium Hostel explores themes of connection, belonging, and self-discovery. Day 1 – Keeping a Diary It was Octave one night in The Moscow Arms who told me about an article he saw in the paper about writing to aliens. I laughed at first but when he explained that this thing called the Sol Project was a deadly serious scientific enterprise in which ordinary people had been invited to participate, I became intrigued and sent off for an entry form. The Pinkland Space Agency is going to beam powerful radio signals towards a star about 35 light years away in an attempt to make contact with an alien civilisation they think is there. The signals will contain many different kinds of communications. There will be greetings and messages of peace from our insincere politicians and summaries of our knowledge from boffins in various fields. But also included will be diaries from average Joes like myself in order to give the aliens as wide an appreciation as possible of life in this neck of the galaxy. I received the entry form a couple of weeks ago and ever since then Octave has kept asking me if I have started the diary. So I bought a large notebook and today I begin writing in my diary for the first time. I have asked him why he wasn’t also going to do it, since he is so enthusiastic about me doing it. ‘My diary would never be accepted,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘The judges will all be Darlingtons,’ said Octave. ‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘Darlingtons?’ said Octave. ‘Culture vultures. Precious, self-important, loose-living bohemians. You know, arty-farties. Those kind of people wouldn’t consider a diary from someone like me for one second, no matter how good it was.’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Just take it from me,’ said Octave, ‘I just know. The kind of people who judge literary competitions are always Darlingtons.’ I had never heard of the term. Must be a Terrarium word. ‘And they are all absolutely stupid,’ Octave added. ‘Total dum-dums. They wouldn’t understand anything I wrote.’ ‘So why do you think my diary will be accepted but yours will be rejected?’ ‘Because you are a fresh-faced, innocent idealist,’ said Octave. ‘They like people like you.’ There is a great expectation that the messages will be understood because apparently the radio signals will also contain sophisticated translation instructions which will, if you have information systems that are compatible, enable you, my dear alien reader, to read the messages in your own idiomatic language and render my unearthly existence in terms that will appear bizarrely familiar to that of your own species. For example, whenever I mention my home star, I will write it as the name I know it as but it will appear in your text as Zeta Herculis B, which is your name for it. Obviously, I don’t call it that and have no idea what you call it. But that is how it will appear in the translation. Sometimes what you read will be a surprisingly accurate description of my reality. At other times though it will be an approximation or a symbolic interpretation of what my life is actually like. But I think the idea is to always make it consistent with a correlate in your world while remaining true to the spirit of my world. I will probably sound more articulate than I actually am but the software will always try and render an accurate representation of what I am saying and strike an emotionally faithful tone. The best analogues will always be used. For example, there is an intelligent aquatic creature in the oceans of our home planet that we call a …well, frankly, a vocalisation that is unlikely to be reproducible in your language … but which will be translated as a dolphin because that is the closest counterpart in your world. (If that last sentence appears even vaguely intelligible to you, I will be amazed because I don’t know if you have any intelligent aquatic creatures in your oceans. Do you even have oceans?) I also might mention at some point that I play a musical instrument. I don’t know how this will be rendered. Do you guys even have music? Even if you do, what are the chances of you having anything like the thing I play? Pretty remote, I would say. But the instrument I play will be described in terms that you can understand – so I play a guitar. Neither of us will know how good a translation that will be. But who knows? Your instruments and our instruments may be remarkably similar. My civilisation has made great advances recently in communications and many people are calling this translation technology the greatest thing we have ever achieved. If you are reading and understanding this, my dear alien reader, then I guess they might be right. I am sure it will at least be better than the old indecipherable hieroglyphics and mind-bending mathematical brainteasers that you poor aliens used to get from us. There is still a possibility though of some very bad errors. The artificial intelligence of the translation technology may find a suitable analogue in your world but not believe it and retranslate it into something preposterous to your ears. Apparently this has happened very occasionally in tests. So if you read the odd weird or unintentionally funny thing, put it down to the stupidity of artificial intelligence. But it’s not my job to explain the technical side. I don’t understand it anyway. My job is to describe my life. All the relevant explanations will be in the Space Agency’s ‘covering letter’, as it were. What they told me in the guidelines is to write as if the reader is completely familiar with my world. I am not to attempt explanations. Personally, I don’t
Foreshore Publishing has acquired Springtime in the Bones (Primavera nos ossos) by Állex Leilla, a controversial, poignant novel, originally written and published in Brazil and translated by Amanda Sarasien. Foreshore Publishing will publish the novel in paperback in September 2025. Springtime in the Bones is a poignant tale of unfulfilled love and vengeance. It follows Luísa, a successful partner at a leading advertising agency in Salvador, whose heart still belongs to her first love, Michel. Despite their five-year marriage and her lingering obsession, Michel has openly embraced his attraction to men, leaving Luísa caught between love and heartache. As the narrative unfolds, we delve into Luísa’s quest for revenge—driven by a traumatic past that the synopsis only hints at: she is a survivor of rape. The most compelling part of the story lies in her relentless pursuit of the men responsible for her trauma. Through meticulous planning and an unyielding desire for retribution, Luísa embarks on a journey that explores themes of empowerment, resilience, and the complexities of love. Foreshore Publishing publisher-in-chief Phil M. Shirley said: ‘We are committed to growing a list of translated fiction, and we couldn’t have a more perfect start than Állex Leilla’s Springtime in the Bones. People want to read things that are pushing the boundaries. We can’t wait to make this incredibly powerful work an unforgettable publication.” Amanda Sarasien is a writer and literary translator working from Portuguese and French. A recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Common, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective (TCTC) and past co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee, and lives in Chicago. She can be found at amandasarasien.com. Állex Leilla (Alessandra Leila Borges Gomes Fernandes) was born in 1971, in Bom Jesus daLapa, Bahia, Brazil. Her first book, a story collection titled Urbanos, won the 1997 BRASKEM Prize, which the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado awards to a debut author. Springtime in the Bones is her second novel, published as Primavera nos ossos in 2010, and funded by the Petrobras Cultural Program – the first of only two Northeastern writer to receive this prestigious grant. A professor of Portuguese literature at the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana (UEFS), Leilla is married to the poet João Filho, and currently resides in Salvador.
Foreshore has signed an unpublished memoir from Stephen Herbert, the academic, film historian and author, in which he reflects on his childhood escapades in Streatham, South London in the 1950s and early 60s that led him to become one of the best loved and sought after experts in motion picture, pre-cinema and photographic technology. Phil M. Shirley, Publisher-in-Chief, and Nicki van Zandt, Publishing Manager, acquired Worldwide rights across formats in The Paraffin Boys for Tributary, and imprint of Foreshore Publishing, from Stephen Herbert’s widow Mo Heard. The book will publish in paperback this summer. The audience will be those with a general interest in British social history and popular culture of the period; people living in South London and former residents with an interest in local history. Written by an academic recounting his working class childhood, this is a unique insight into how “the Child becomes Father to the Man”. “This memoir is not an exercise in nostalgia for older readers, but rather an account of the freedom children enjoyed in late 1950s and early 1960s London,” Heard said. “With the debate today around parents’ concerns in allowing their children to play outside, or choose their own adventures without adult supervision, this book is a look back at what children did with their unfettered ingenuity and imagination, and how they survived sixty years ago. “Stephen’s undimmed curiosity in all things included his own childhood history. In The Paraffin Boys he delights in remembering the friends, the wheezes, and the doubtful fun to be had with electricity and fireworks. We understand how early interests formed Stephen’s career path: from teaching animation, researching and writing about popular optical media, restoring old cinema projectors, building model aeroplanes, to collecting old radios. The seeds of his knowledge and expertise were sown from an early age, and grew in the fertile soil of his curious mind. He includes researched explanatory notes for each chapter.” Phil M. Shirley said: ‘It is a privilege for all of us at Foreshore to publish The Paraffin Boys. Stephen Herbert’s work is utterly unique within the landscape of British film and this revealing memoir offers a mesmerising journey through the experiences and influences that shaped him into the renowned figure he is today. When I first read the manuscript, I came away with the feeling that I wanted to press it into the hands of all the writers and readers that I know and all the team here can’t wait to do that very thing this summer.’ Stephen Herbert (1951-2023) was a British visual media historian, author, editor, publisher and projectionist. Herbert was a projectionist at various London cinemas from 1969 to 1973, before spending sixteen years as a technician in audio-visual education. He joined the British Film Institute’s National Film Theatre in 1989, first as deputy then as head of Technical Department. This included responsibility for projection at the London Film Festival and the Museum of the Moving Image. He was also a development team member for the BFI IMAX from 1995 to 1997. Later on, his knowledge of early visual media was sought out by academics, museums, programme makers and film producers, and his expertise in all things to do with the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge led to a visiting research fellowship at Kingston University. He also gave advice to moving image museums in Dubai and Qatar and was a technical consultant on Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo (2011), ensuring that its marvellous recreation of the studio of the French film pioneer Georges Méliès was authentic. Herbert is also the author of several books including the biography of Edwardian visual media pioneer Theodore Brown (1997) and Industry, Liberty and a Vision (1998), on inventor and political theorist Wordsworth Donisthorpe. As an editor Herbert compiled a trio of three-volume sets on pre-cinema, early film and early television for Routledge, and co-edited Magic Images, Servants of Light and The Encyclopaedia of the Magic Lantern, all published by the Magic Lantern Society, for whom he was research officer 1988–2000
