Beside the Sea

The author's 50th published short story, and one of his best.I have read 'Beside the Sea' perhaps four or five times since its original publication in the short-lived British SF magazine Beyond. It is a magical fantasy, a parable in the form of a rite-of-passage story, both frightening and bizarre, about the fear of change: it's a tirade against conformity at once unsettling and, in its moving last paragraph, beautifully optimistic. It's a story I come back to again and again, and one which I wish I had written myself — and there can be no greater recommendation than that. – Eric Brown