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