HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015 Stories from this collection have previously appeared in the following publications: Nova (1967), New Writings in SF (1967), New Worlds Science Fiction (1967, 1969), Titbits (1967), Orbit 2: The Best Science Fiction of the Year (1967), Impulse (1967), Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories, Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories (1967), Galaxy Magazine (1968, 1969), Solstice (1969). Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015 Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007482290 Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008148973 Version: 2015-07-31
Contents
Copyright
Introduction
1 A Difficult Age
2 A Taste for Dostoevsky
3 Auto-Ancestral Fracture
4 Confluence
5 The Dead Immortal
6 Down the Up Escalation
7 Full Sun
8 Just Passing Through
9 Multi-Value Motorway
10 The Night that All Time Broke Out
11 Randy’s Syndrome
12 Still Trajectories
13 Two Modern Myths (Reflection on Mars and Ultimate Construction)
14 Wonder Weapon
15 …And the Stagnation of the Heart
16 Drake-Man Route
17 Dreamer, Schemer
18 Dream of Distance
19 Send her Victorious
20 The Serpent of Kundalini
21 The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine
22 Total Environment
23 The Village Swindler
24 When I Was Very Jung
25 The Worm that Flies
26 The Firmament Theorem
27 Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts
28 The Humming Heads
29 The Moment of Eclipse
30 Ouspenski’s Astrabahn
31 Since the Assassination
32 So Far From Prague
33 The Soft Predicament
34 Supertoys Last All Summer Long
35 That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art…
36 Working in the Spaceship Yards
About the Author
Also by Brian Aldiss
About the Publisher
Should an author concern himself about who his readers are? Should he worry about what they think of his writings?
Is not the world full of better and more cogent concerns?
These questions I raise without, hardly surprisingly, being able to answer them.
I raise them because I have been so entirely a writer all my long life, forever concerned with what to say and why I choose – or why I have been chosen – to say it.
Hardly a year has passed without the publication of a slender book of verse, a translation of the poems of Makhtumkuli, a novel, SF, a travel book, a volume of social commentary, or a selection of short stories, as here and now.
The possible length of a tale has long been of interest. One of my inventions was the mini-saga. My mini-saga project was to confine a story within fifty words. Titles did not count within the bastions of that punitive fifty. The Daily Telegraph embraced my idea, and we ran mini-story competitions in the paper for six successive years.
My determination from the start was that a mini-saga should not be trivial; its spacial limitations drained narrative from the form; a moral aspect should remain.
Here is the example I offered my newspaper readers:
Happiness and suffering
The doors of the amber palace
closed behind the young king.
For twenty years he dallied with
his favourite courtesans. Outside,
the land fell into decay. Warlords
terrorised the population.
Famine and pestilence struck,
of which chronicles still tell.
The king emerged at last.
He had no history to relate.
Some years after this was published, I discovered that a beautiful and cultured lady of my acquaintance carried a cutting with her of this mini-saga in her purse. What is more enthralling than fame? Why, secrecy …
When I phoned The Telegraph with my suggestion, I was working at the other end of the narrative scale, on a long trilogy concerning a planet called Helliconia.
And now? A new year dawned and I suddenly determined to challenge myself, not with shortage of words but with shortage of time. In brief, I would write a short story every day in succession. This book contains some of the results.
To be honest (generally a foolish thing for a writer to do) a short story written on a Monday requires a Tuesday as well. On Tuesday, you edit, you correct, you knock out ungainly sentences, you amplify, you may suddenly discover a new meaning that had never occurred to you on the