Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

Copyright Contents Cover Title Page 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

Harper Voyager an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.ukFirst published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 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 © HarperCollins Publishers 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

Cover

Title Page

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

Introduction Contents Cover Title Page 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 Monday. So you in effect rewrite. That’s what Tuesdays are for … the writing of tiny masterpieces …