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  Anticipations is a collection of stories, all new and most written especially for it, by some of the best science fiction writers of our day. Collected and introduced by Christopher Priest, himself one of science fiction’s major talents, the stories are as diverse and original as the writers themselves. From Robert Sheckley’s wry paranoia about voyeurism to Ian Watson’s metaphysical vision of an exceedingly slothful time machine, from J.G. Ballard’s haunting obsession with the artifacts of the Second World War to Brian W. Aldiss’s elegant philosophical discourse, the stories display a dazzling range of subject and style. Bob Shaw, Thomas M. Disch, Harry Harrison, and Christopher Priest are all at top form.

  Each of these writers has a reputation and following of his own. Together they make for a brilliant and important collection, a must for anyone interested in science fiction.

  Jacket illustration by Dave Griffiths

  Anticipations

  Other books by Christopher Priest

  *INDOCTRINAIRE

  FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND

  INVERTED WORLD

  *REAL-TIME WORLD (short stories)

  *THE SPACE MACHINE

  A DREAM OF WESSEX

  (*not available from Faber & Faber)

  Introduction and this collection © 1978, Christopher Priest

  The Very Slow Time Machine © 1978, Ian Watson

  Is That What People Do? © 1978, Robert Sheckley

  Amphitheatre © 1978, Bob Shaw

  The Negation © 1978, Christopher Priest

  The Greening of the Green © 1978, Harry Harrison

  Mutability © 1978, Thomas M. Disch

  One Afternoon at Utah Beach © 1978, J.G. Ballard

  A Chinese Perspective © 1978, Southmoor Serendipity Ltd.

  Copyright under the Berne Convention

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this

  book may be reproduced in any form

  without the permission of Charles

  Scribner’s Sons.

  Printed in Great Britain

  Library of Congress Card Number 78-52223

  ISBN 0 684 15634 2

  Contents

  Introduction

  by Christopher Priest

  IAN WATSON

  The Very Slow Time Machine

  ROBERT SHECKLEY

  Is That What People Do?

  BOB SHAW

  Amphitheatre

  CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

  The Negation

  HARRY HARRISON

  The Greening of the Green

  THOMAS M. DISCH

  Mutability

  J.G. BALLARD

  One Afternoon at Utah Beach

  BRIAN W. ALDISS

  A Chinese Perspective

  CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

  Introduction

  All the stories in this book are brand-new, and in almost every case have been written especially for it. What I believe is more important, though, is that this is not just a collection of short stories, but is more accurately described as a book of writers. Everyone in this book was invited to contribute because of my own very high regard for his work. The result is that here we have several of the best science fiction writers working today; each one has a reputation and a following of his own, and it’s unnecessary for me to make extravagant claims for the stories. The publication of this book is the first occasion on which all these writers have been brought together under one roof, so to speak.

  (I should mention in passing that there are other writers I should like to have included, but restrictions of space make it necessary for this to be a partial selection. I’m also sorry that there are no women writers here, as I should have liked to include some; there is nothing sinisterly anti-feminist about what could seem by intent to be an all-male preserve.)

  I’m emphasizing the writerly nature of this book because I feel this has been an area of neglect in science fiction.

  The friends of science fiction (of whom there are many) point with justification to the stimulating ideas it produces, and to its immediacy and its relevance to the modern world.

  Those who dislike science fiction or ignore it (of whom there are many more) point with some justification to its sensationalist past or to its more blatant examples of hackneyed writing.

  Both friend and foe (if that is the word) speak thus of science fiction in the abstract . . . and it is perfectly possible to treat science fiction as something that can be identified and separated and discussed. One can say to a certain extent what it can do and what it can’t, or what it is, and what it isn’t. There’s a general consensus on these matters, with enough marginal material to provide consternation and contention to those prepared to bend their minds around the problem. But whatever anyone says, science fiction does not have an actual existence, as a mountain, for instance, can be said to have an existence. It is much more like the name of a city: one can walk through a place collectively known as, say, “London”, but no one building or street or person can be said to represent the distilled essence of Londonness.

  (Probably the only concrete existence that science fiction enjoys is the labelling employed by publishers and booksellers to identify the category . . . but isn’t this similar to the signposts on city limits?)

  It is also misleading to talk about the “rules” of science fiction, although a lot of breath is expended on this, particularly regarding the scientific content of sf. I once had the cheek to set one of my novels in the nineteenth century (“Is this the way science fiction should be going?” thundered a few of the critics, as if I was driving a train into the wrong tunnel), and at least two of the stories in this collection do not have strict scientific rationalizations. The rules of science fiction seem to me rather like the rules of grammar applied to literature: good writing is usually grammatical, but grammar alone does not make for good writing.

  Literature and cultural evolution are the shapers and changers of what is considered grammatical, and so it is that our understanding of the abstract nature of science fiction should be shaped and changed by what is written.

  Anyway, as Brian Aldiss said many years ago, all good sf hovers on the verge of being something other than sf.

  If all this sounds slightly defensive, it is because the abstract nature of sf often comes in for dismissal from those who feel there are better things to do in life than read science fiction. (I remember watching a trendy academic on television dismiss science fiction as trashy popular culture, then excuse The War of the Worlds, Nineteen Eighty-Four and a handful of other titles, because they were, after all, by good writers.) It is sometimes said or implied, for instance, that the genre nature

  of science fiction entitles it to the same sort of literary dismissiveness one would accord to a Western or a romance, and thus the point is missed that the label is a publishing expedient and not a literary judgement. The good writers of science fiction have about as much in common with each other as do good writers of any other fiction (a fact which I hope will be clear from this book).

  The readers, too, of science fiction are not what one would expect to find clustered around a category of fiction. Regular readers of romances take comfort from the reassuring familiarity they find; Western readers are quickly disappointed if the writer does not supply them with the expected ritual of bar-room brawls, ranchers, six-guns and frontier violence. Most genre-writing is pitched at the same sort of intellectual level as television light-entertainment or series-drama, presenting as its only innovations plot-twists or character-orientation. The audie
nce for science fiction expects, and usually gets, fiction that presents narrative intrigue, emotional involvement, cerebral stimulation and a considerable element of surprise. There is also a large audience for writers who are ambitious with style and language, and who are as much concerned with literary values as they are with innovative concepts.

  Of course, all this is equally true of the best general fiction . . . but that isn’t published with computer-typeface on the cover, and colourful renderings of exotic landscapes.

  This is why I prefer to place the emphasis of this book on the contributors as individual writers, rather than on the “kind” of fiction they might be said to be writing. I hope you will therefore read and enjoy these stories in the same way as I did when they were sent to me: as the latest and newest work from some of the best science fiction writers of today.

  A few words about the authors and their stories:

  Ian Watson. Ian Watson and I often find ourselves at friendly odds with each other (he’s unlikely to agree with much of what I have so far said in this Introduction, for instance), and our individual approaches to writing could hardly be more different. Nevertheless, I find myself in great admiration of most of his work. It is only a relatively short time since his first novel, the rightly acclaimed The Embedding, was published.

  However, few authors have established themselves quite so quickly; by the time this book is published at least four of Watson’s novels will be in print. His books have a Wagnerian quality to them, with immense clashings of intellectual bravura and cosmic event. {The Jonah Kit, for example, takes as a secondary proposition the idea that the Universe is illusory.) “The Very Slow Time Machine” seems at first sight, and perhaps on the strength of its title, to be one of those novelty-ideas that pop up from time to time, but before many pages have been turned it quickly becomes clear that the eponymous machine carries with it some awesome significance. I think it’s a tremendously good story.

  Robert Sheckley. It seems an extraordinary thing to say, but Robert Sheckley is one of the most seriously underrated writers in science fiction. The sf world is inordinately fond of giving prizes to its writers, and yet Sheckley, in more than a quarter-century of professional writing, has managed to achieve the paradoxical position of never having won a single major award, while at the same time being one of the most consistently popular and widely read authors. I suspect this is because his work accurately reflects the mood of the day, so that his virtues are appreciated only after the qualifying period for the Hugo or Nebula, or whatever, is long past. Sheckley writes with a deft combination of wit, cynicism and paranoia, thus evoking the unusual simultaneous response of laughter and nervous twitch. His collection The Same to you Doubled contains some of his best work. The story in this book, “Is That What People Do?”, is Sheckley slightly to the left of centre, lighter on the satire than usual, but with his observation of the human animal as sharply focused as ever, and the paranoia standing by, ready to pounce on the reader on the way out.

  Bob Shaw. Bob Shaw is the master of the telling detail and the evocative metaphor, by which I mean he has the enviable talent of persuading his readers of the most outrageous cosmic concepts by first persuading them of the truth of his characters, and later by writing about those characters and their adventures in unadorned and succinct prose that stimulates, but does not belabour, the imagination. This kind of writing has honourable precedents in science fiction—notably in the work of John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke—but for my money Shaw has a better imagination than one of them, and is a better writer than the other. Of his novels, I like Orbitsville and A Wreath of Stars the best; his collections of short stories are also worth finding. Writing about “Amphitheatre”, the story in this book, Shaw says: “This story is one of the most personal I’ve ever written, one which tries to express an emotion rather than an intellectual concept.” Hearing this, some will be surprised to discover that this story, of all those here, is the one that lies closest to the traditional heart of science fiction: adventure on an alien planet. It is typical of Shaw that he should treat his subject-matter in such a way.

  Christopher Priest. I can’t pretend that my story in this book does not exist, so allow me to enjoy the indulgence of writing about myself. My first novel was published in 1970, and since then there have been four others. Perhaps my best-known book is Inverted World (for which one critic adroitly labelled me “hyperbolist without exaggeration”), but the one I like best myself—though probably for the wrong reasons—is The Space Machine (the one where I took the train into the wrong tunnel). My most recent novel is A Dream of Wessex. I wrote “The Negation” especially for this book (because I’m the boss), and it’s part of a series I’m presently working through, about a world where the islands known as the Dream Archipelago are the dominant physical feature.

  Harry Harrison. There are two literary manifestations of Harry Harrison: one as an anarchically funny writer, and one deeply serious. His serious work, though, does not have the po-faced solemnity of the clown playing Hamlet, for he always writes with pace and flair, and a crispness of image; his novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! is one of his best. He has written one of the most compelling novels on overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room! (later filmed, with passing fidelity to the text, as Soylent Green), and, more recently, a long novel about an Apollo/Soyuz disaster, Sky fall. His humorous writing includes Bill, the Galactic Hero, his novels about the Stainless Steel Rat and Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (which last sends up just about every cliché of the space-adventure, a type of story not short on clichés). “The Greening of the Green” falls somewhere between the two: the jokes are fired from the hip, but beneath the hail is a straightforward science fiction idea. The fact that Harrison is now a resident of Ireland is not coincidental to the story.

  Thomas M. Disch. Tom Disch is a writer of such extreme precision and delicacy that it is entirely possible to enjoy his work for the qualities of the prose alone (a statement partly supported by the fact that a book-length structuralist critical study by Samuel R. Delany of one of Disch’s short stories, “Angouleme”, will be published in the United States soon). Disch is also a poet, and a volume of his poetry, The Right Way to Figure Plumbing, has been published in the States. Like many science fiction writers, Disch is intrigued by the possibilities of the subject-matter, and his extant body of work constitutes a remarkable achievement. His first novel, The Genocides, was an utterly bleak and pessimistic story about the destruction of the human species, relieved by astonishing passages of mordant wit; other novels have included the philosophically complex Camp Concentration and perhaps his best novel so far, 334 (of which “Angouleme” was a part). “Mutability”, included here, is not a short story as such (although it can certainly be read as one) but is an extract from The Pressure of Time, one of two science fiction novels he is writing at the moment.

  J.G. Ballard. My first awareness of J.G. Ballard’s fiction was when he was a regular contributor to the British sf magazine New Worlds in the early 1960s. His haunting stories—a blend of the naggingly familiar and the bizarrely surreal—were, in their day, outstanding, and time has not diminished them; most of them are still in print in his many story-collections. Ballard first drew critical attention, notably from Kingsley Amis, for his three “disaster” novels, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World, but for me his later novels are more successful. One of them—Crash, published in 1973—strikes me as one of the most extraordinary and original novels of any kind published in the last five years or so. Ballard’s work is remarkable for the intensity and uniqueness of vision: his obsessed protagonists, moving towards a kind of psychic fulfilment through a landscape cluttered with the rusting technology and abandoned artefacts of a corrupt society, are archetypal modern men. Ballard’s fiction will one day be seen as a most accurate literary reflection of the late twentieth century. “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”, which I am delighted to publish here, has a pleasing hardness at its core that is as memorabl
e as the starkness of the author’s images.

  Brian W. Aldiss. Brian Aldiss has had a great influence on science fiction (which he would probably try to deny), both in terms of the approach to the writing of it, and in the way sf writers address themselves to the world at large. He was, for instance, one of the first writers of real literary ability to stand up and say, in no uncertain terms, that he was a science fiction writer. Although he has published general fiction (The Hand-Reared Boy was a famous success) and has written on art, travel and drama, and published a long history of science fiction, it is probably his sf that will be seen as his major work. From the beginning, Aldiss has been a stylist, and his best work celebrates the English language with an infectious joy. The novels of his I have particularly enjoyed, and continue to admire, are Non-Stop, Greybeard, A Soldier Erect and the glorious Frankenstein Unbound. His short stories too have been exceptional; a good selection can be found in The Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss. Recently, Aldiss has been writing novella-length stories, and “A Chinese Perspective” is the latest. I believe this is amongst the best of his recent work: a wry and humorous story, which, in spite of apparent whimsicalities, leads to a serious and complex philosophical dilemma.

  I’d like to close by expressing gratitude and respect to my publisher, Charles Monteith, whose help and friendly cooperation with the preparation of the book made this whole enterprise possible.

  IAN WATSON

  The Very Slow Time Machine

  (1990)

  The Very Slow Time Machine—for convenience: the VSTM[*]—made its first appearance at exactly midday I December 1985 in an unoccupied space at the National Physical Laboratory. It signalled its arrival with a loud bang and a squall of expelled air. Dr. Kelvin, who happened to be looking in its direction, reported that the VSTM did not exactly spring into existence instantly, but rather expanded very rapidly from a point source, presumably explaining the absence of a more devastating explosion as the VSTM jostled with the air already present in the room. Later, Kelvin declared that what he had actually seen was the implosion of the VSTM. Doors were sucked shut by the rush of air, instead of bursting open, after all. However it was a most confused moment—and the confusion persisted, since the occupant of the VSTM (who alone could shed light on its nature) was not only time-reversed with regard to us, but also quite crazy.