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The Time-Lapsed Man by Eric Brown, Pan, pp 216, Pounds sterling 3.99

Interzone: The Fourth Anthology edited by John Clute, David Pringle
and Simon Ounsley, New English Library, pp 208, Pounds sterling 3.50

IN THE science fiction world it was traditional for writers to cut their
teeth on short stories before progressing to novels. These days too many
new science fiction and fantasy writers are launching straight into novels,
without learning the discipline that the shorter form imposes – and it shows.
Science fiction magazines are not only an excellent but also a necessary
training ground.

It is unusual, though – and these days almost unheard of – for a writer’s
first book to be a collection of short stories. True, Eric Brown has written
something like 18 novels by the age of 30 but, as his own best critic, he
has filed them under ‘experience’ rather than trying to push them into print.
His short stories, on the other hand, have been appearing regularly for
the past three years, mainly in the pages of Interzone, Britain’s only regular
science fiction magazine.

Five of the eight stories collected here are set in the same universe,
one which successfully weds the better elements of the recent cyberpunk
movement in science fiction with far more traditional space operatic tropes.
Most feature two old science fiction favourites, faster-than-light travel
and telepathy, but unlike the ‘golden age’ science fiction of the 1940s
and 1950s, they use these as givens, and concentrate their plotting on human
issues: love, revenge, crime, drugs, illness and death.

The title story, which is also in the Interzone collection, describes
a rare illness afflicting a space engineman. First his hearing is delayed
by an hour; then his other senses – taste, smell and ultimately sight –
are also affected, until he is experiencing his own immediate past rather
than the present. It is an intensely lonely, frightening, human problem
caused by future technology, and sets the tone for the rest of the collection.

The last story, ‘The Inheritors of Earth’, is a neatly written pastiche
of H. G. Wells, set in journal form; it contrasts markedly with Brian Stableford’s
‘The Growth of the House of Usher’, an Edgar Allan Poe pastiche, which kicks
off the fourth Interzone anthology. Brown’s story, about re-siting Neanderthal
Man in the far future, may be less original in its premise than Stableford’s,
about a literally living, growing house, but it is far better written and
holds the interest throughout. Stableford’s tale is carefully written and
scientifically more clever, but it is slow-moving and dull; the writer is
an academic, and has an unfortunate tendency to lecture.

The anthology is very much a mixed bag. Several of the writers, following
Stableford’s lead, are too self-indulgent.

Having said that, the good stories are quite excellent. Lisa Goldstein
is today’s Isaac Bashevis Singer; her moving ‘City of Peace’ is remarkable
for being written from the point of view of a West Bank Arab in a near-future
Jerusalem.

Rachel Pollack has set ‘The Bead Woman’ in the world of her novel Unquenchable
Fire, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction
novel of 1988. This world is a present day analogue of America where magical
and mystical religion is very much a reality. So, predictably perhaps, is
religious intolerance.

J. G. Ballard, that maverick survivor of the 1960s’ New Wave in science
fiction, continues his quest into inner space in ‘The Enormous Space’, a
wonderfully chilling study of madness. Madness is also the basis of Richard
Calder’s ‘Toxine’, perhaps the best story in the anthology. A child discovers
a broken 19th-century full-sized china and clockwork automaton of a teenage
girl, and devotes his life to the creation of a working model. The reader
identifies with the love he has for the girl, which makes the shock of his
later horrific action all the more effective.

And for a good, hard science-based traditional story, with a brand new,
faster than faster-than-light, one-person spaceship heading out 15 billion
light years to investigate an event that happened microseconds after the
big bang, S. M. Baxter’s ‘The Quagma Datum’ offers a skilful blend of subnuclear
physics, adventure, human greed and quick thinking that rounds this anthology
off in a far better state than it started.

Interzone 4 is patchy, but the good stories more than compensate for
the weak ones; The Time-Lapsed Man is an extremely impressive debut and,
overall, it is the more satisfying read.

David Barrett is a senior editor at Computer Weekly. He has edited the
forthcoming anthology Digital Dreams (Hodder & Stoughton, October 1990).