Eastbayri.com

PORTSMOUTH — The cover story in the next issue of the magazine “Fantasy & Science Fiction”(F&SF) was penned by award-winning Portsmouth author John G. McDaid.

The story, “Umbrella Men,” is an urban fantasy about a magical umbrella — or two — which may have been involved in some of the 20th century’s pivotal moments. The issue will be on newsstands in late December.

“This was a lot of fun to write,” said Mr. McDaid. “History always looks like conspiracy in retrospect. It gave me an opportunity to explore some big themes while telling a very personal, human story.”

At the heart of “Umbrella Men” is a librarian from Brooklyn and his family, who are in possession of what may be a mystical umbrella that dates back to the dawn of history.

Mr. McDaid explains the origin of the story in a class he took years ago.

“Science fiction writer Terry Bisson taught a workshop at the New School for Social Research in 1994, and one of his writing prompts was, ‘a story in which giving someone an umbrella leads to world peace.’ It made me wonder what kind of umbrella that would have to be.”

The idea percolated for years, Mr. McDaid said, before he was ready to write the tale. “The story itself, I wrote in a week, at a workshop at Toronto's Gibraltar Point Center for the Arts.” The harder part, he said, was creating a web extra. “I wanted to give this some depth and a hook to reality, so I built out a fictional blog — thedarkumbrella.com — written by one of the other characters in the story, a conspiracy researcher who crosses paths with the librarian.”

Mr. McDaid said he was delighted with the issue's cover art, a painting by well-known science fiction illustrator Mark Evans. “He really captured the sense of mystery and magic.”

Mr. McDaid won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his 1995 debut story, “Jigoku no mokushiroku,” which appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. His 2005 story, “Keyboard Practice,” which also appeared in F&SF, won the Media Ecology Association’s Mary Shelley Award. His hypertext novel, “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse” (Eastgate Systems, 1992) was reviewed in the New York Times. In addition to his fiction writing, Mr. McDaid covers Portsmouth at his site, harddeadlines.com.