Scots has a living vernacular, a well-established and historically continuous poetry tradition, and next to no modern prose. The absence of a significant prose tradition, either fiction or non-fiction, means that Scots is a national language without a well-established narrative or formal prose register. If a specific register of a language requires common usage and understanding in order to exist, then this absence of a historically continuous prose register goes some way to explaining why attempts at journalism in Scots, such as in the recent pages of The National and The Herald, have, as noted by Scott Hames (Hames 2018), been met by opposition and derision: the understanding is not there, so the register does not exist, so the understanding is prevented. Nonetheless, novelists continue to attempt the work of Scots prose – so what happens when you attempt to write in a language that doesn't exist? My argument is that, if you want to write in a language without the appropriate register, you have no option but to continuously invent it, and that this continuous invention is a science fiction project.

I begin by briefly outlining contrasting approaches to Scots prose, and then examine the temporalities of Scots and Scottish science fiction, at both the technical and narrative levels. Throughout, my approach to Scots literature is informed by postcolonial studies and in particular the postcolonial turn in science fiction studies, and so I conclude with reflections on Scotland's double role anent postcolonialism and the double bind in which it places the Scots science fiction novel. If the Scots language is a science fiction project, then this project is both what enables Scots to be written now and what limits the possibilities for Scots in the future.

Imagining Scots Prose

There are two major approaches to Scots language narrative prose.2 The first is the vernacular, represented, for example, by James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), Alison Miller's Demo (2005) and Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2014). These novels, with greater or lesser fidelity and naturalism, and with greater or lesser proximity to the acrolect, seek to put on the page the Scots language as it is spoken in their author's time and locale. Demo opens thus: