‘The whole account is, of course, unreasonable,’ he said, ‘and yet it is pervaded throughout with such an air of reasonableness.’
Six short stories, four of them about alternative realities or minds which are inexplicably transferred forward in time and into other bodies. The first and longest story is a vivid continuation of Wyndham’s interest in women’s liberation.
Consider Her Ways (1956)
‘Woman, who is the vessel of life, had the misfortune to find man necessary for a time, but now she does no longer… Man was only a means to an end. We needed him in order to have babies. The rest of his vitality accounted for all the misery in the world. We are a great deal better off without him.’
This is by way of being a novella, running to 65 pages in the Penguin paperback. It starts with a page describing someone disembodied, outside themselves, not even aware of a personality, a floating ball of consciousness, a weird out-of-body description which could come from Sam Beckett’s highly experimental novel, The Unnameable (which had published only a few years earlier in 1953):
I hung in a timeless, spaceless, forceless void that was neither light, nor dark. I had entity, but no form; awareness, but no senses; mind, but no memory. I wondered, is this – this nothingness – my soul? And it seemed that I had wondered that always, and should go on wondering it for ever …
But, somehow, timelessness ceased. I became aware that there was a force: that I was being moved, and that spacelessness had, therefore, ceased, too. There was nothing to show that I moved; I knew simply that I was being drawn. I felt happy because I knew there was something or someone to whom I wanted to be drawn. I had no other wish than to turn like a compass-needle, and then fall through the void …
This floating consciousness slowly finds form and coherence and becomes aware of itself. It is a ‘she’ and discovers herself in a body in a hospital ward. Looking around she discovers three obscenely fat women lying on trolleys. Looking down she discovers she herself is encased in just such an obscenely fat body and starts screaming and then faints from shock. She is sedated. When she comes round she discovers her name is Mother Orchis, a Class One mother’, and is told she has just delivered four babies.
She is loaded into a pink ambulance (she is too fat to walk) and taken on a long journey through calm countryside. From the ambulance window she sees only women working in the fields, tough brawny looking lot she christens Amazons. (As a side note, there is a reference to ‘Whitewich’ [where Mother Orchis would be sent if she had had ‘grade 2’ babies, which reminds the reader of the fictional ‘Westwich of Pawley’s Peepholes and, of course, the Midwich of The Midwich Cuckoos.)
She arrives at some kind of ‘clinic’ where she is unloaded and wheeled into a ward by tiny little attendants who are about four feet tall and yet seem fully grown. Slowly she realises the five other women on the ward are all called ‘mothers’, too. But she is radically unlike them and scandalises them by claiming she can read and write. She now regards the entire thing as a hallucination.
The other Mothers are scandalised by her talk and she begins to realise they are illiterate and have been kept in a state of ignorance. When she starts to talk about her husband and men in general, she is stunned to realise the mothers genuinely have no idea what she’s talking about.
Suddenly she has a memory. Her husband was named Donald. She is named Jane, she was Jane Waterleigh until she married Donald Summers, she is a qualified doctor (i.e. highly rational and logical). Now she remembers that her husband was badly injured in a plane crash.
After more feeding and sleep Jane is visited by a woman doctor who, unlike either the mothers or the little helpers is a ‘normal’ shape and appearance. The doctor is shocked to discover she can read and disgusted that she’s been filling the other mothers’ heads with nonsense about ‘men’ and there being two ‘sexes’. During the interview the doctor goes from patronising, to astonished, to angry that someone has been filling Mother Orchis’s head with this rubbish, to genuine puzzlement.
After the doctor leaves, Jane makes a bid for freedom, but finds it difficult even getting out of bed and the four-foot Servitors are closing in on her even as she trips, falls down some stairs, bangs her head and loses consciousness.
Now more of her memory returns in a flash: how she was a fully qualified doctor, married to the loving Gordon, a test pilot, till he died in an aircrash, asked to return to work, worked at Wraychester hospital, then after some time was asked by a Dr Hellyer if she’d like to volunteer for trials of a new drug. It was called ‘chuinjuatin,’ a narcotic:
‘The original form is in the leaves of a tree that grows chiefly in the south of Venezuela. The tribe of Indians who live there discovered it somehow, like others did quinine and mescalin. And in much the same way they use it for orgies. Some of them sit and chew the leaves – they have to chew about six ounces of them – and gradually they go into a zombie-like, trance state. It lasts three or four days during which they are quite helpless and incapable of doing the simplest thing for themselves, so that other members of the tribe are appointed to look after them as if they were children, and to guard them… It’s necessary to guard them because the Indian belief is that chuinjuatin liberates the spirit from the body, setting it free to wander anywhere in space and time, and the guardian’s most important job is
Aha. So by now the reader has realised this is a kind of mind transportation story or, as the characters out it, a case of ‘transferred personality’, very like the story of From Pillar To Post and, like that story, the transportation has occurred into the Future, where – as so often in this kind of story – some massive social dislocation has taken place and the mind or time traveller needs to be informed (along with the reader) what happened to bring about such a drastic social change.
Which is precisely what now happens because, after her interview, the doctor who interviewed her decides Jane should be loaded up into another of those pink ambulances and driven through the relaxed countryside to a stylish 18th century villa, beautifully furnished inside, where she is introduced to Laura, an elegant 80-year-old lady, who’s a historian, and who can answer most of Jane’s (and the reader’s) questions.
She tells Jane that she is a historian and asks a servant to bring sherry i.e. Jane is going to be treated as an equal. Laura now tells her that, two long lifetimes ago, about 120 years, all the men died out in a plague, within a year.
In a sense the most interesting part of the story is what now follows for Laura, never having lived in a world with men in it, and as a historian, has studied the subject and – we realise – the dogma of the future, written by women for women taking the women’s point of view, portrays a world of two sexes as one of unremitting exploitation of women by men.
‘Women must never for a moment be allowed to forget their sex, and compete as equals. Everything had to have a “feminine angle” which must be different from the masculine angle, and be dinned in without ceasing. It would have been unpopular for manufacturers actually to issue an order “back to the kitchen”, but there were other ways. A profession without a difference, called “housewife”, could be invented. The kitchen could be glorified and made more expensive; it could be made to seem desirable, and it could be shown that the way to realize this heart’s desire was through marriage. So the presses turned out, by the hundred thousand a week, journals which concentrated the attention of women ceaselessly and relentlessly upon selling themselves to some man in order that they might achieve some small, uneconomic unit of a home upon which money could be spent.
Whole trades adopted the romantic approach and the glamour was spread thicker and thicker in the articles, the write-ups, and most of all in the advertisements. Romance found a place in everything that women might buy from underclothes to motor-cycles, from “health” foods to kitchen stoves, from deodorants to foreign travel, until soon they were too bemused to be amused any more.
‘The air was filled with frustrated moanings. Women maundered in front of microphones yearning only to “surrender”, and “give themselves”, to adore and to be adored. The cinema most of all maintained the propaganda, persuading the main and important part of their audience, which was female, that nothing in life was worth achieving but dewy-eyed passivity in the strong arms of Romance. The pressure became such that the majority of young women spent all their leisure time dreaming of Romance, and the means of securing it. They were brought to a state of honestly believing that to be owned by some man and set down in a little brick box to buy all the things that the manufacturers wanted them to buy would be the highest form of bliss that life could offer.’
Jane tries to protest that it wasn’t like that but Laura knows better and continues:
They hoodwinked you, my dear. Between them they channelled your interests and ambitions along courses that were socially convenient, economically profitable, and almost harmless.’
But what about ‘love’, Jane asks. Laura has a smart confident answer to that, too:
‘You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamorised by Romance. You were never openly bought and sold, like livestock; you never had to sell yourself to the first-comer in order to live; you did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries have screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city – nor were you ever flung into a pit of fire to be saved from them; you were never compelled to suttee upon your dead husband’s pyre; you did not have to spend your whole life imprisoned in a harem; you were never part of the cargo of a slave-ship; you never retained your own life only at the pleasure of your lord and master …
There’s one last fact to be conveyed, which is how the men died out. Laura explains that historical records show it was the result of the research work of a Dr Perrigan, who was doing extensive research producing viruses by radioactive mutation, with a view to controlling populations of first rabbits and then the brown rats which carry plague and other infectious diseases. Well, nobody knows how it got out, but a mutant virus which attacked humans escaped from the lab, and, although some women were infected, most made a recovery, whereas almost all men were infected and it killed them.
Within a few years almost all men were dead. Society collapsed since almost all manual labour, oil extraction, food raising and so on, was run by men. It took decades but the most educated women were often the doctors and they found themselves brought together into a new class, which called itself ‘The Doctorate’. They wondered how to re-organise society on a more rational, less exploitative basis until someone referred to the Bible quote: : “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways.”
‘A four-class system was chosen as the basis, and strong differentiations were gradually introduced. These, now that they have become well established, greatly help to ensure stability – there is scope for ambition within one’s class, but none for passing from one class to another. Thus, we have the Doctorate – the educated ruling-class, fifty per cent of whom are actually of the medical profession. The Mothers, whose title is self-explanatory. The Servitors who are numerous and, for psychological reasons, small. The Workers, who are physically and muscularly strong, to do the heavier work. All the three lower classes respect the authority of the Doctorate. Both the employed classes revere the Mothers. The Servitors consider themselves more favoured in their tasks than the Workers; and the Workers tend to regard the puniness of the Servitors with a semi-affectionate contempt.
The interview comes to an end. Jane is packed by the little women into another pink ambulance but taken to a new place, more a clinic than the Mothers’ home. Here three doctors attend who are not unsympathetic. The only solution they can think of to help her fit in with her current situation is to hypnotise her so she forgets everything. Jane is understandably reluctant and makes a suggestion of her own – that she be given another dose of huinjuatin, as close as possible to the original one. The doctors agree to give it a try and obtain some of the drug. Jane is very tense as they line up to give her big fat blobby body the injection and then…
At this point the narrative changes tone and we learn the entire thing is a written account of her experience which she deposited with her bank upon returning to the body of Jane in the 20th century.
And that, very like the ending of the From Pillar To Post, another mind transport story, the final part of the narrative switches away from the first-person narrator to the point of view of the authorities involved in ‘the case’ who are reviewing and considering the narrative we have just read.
Now, suddenly, right at the end, we learn that we are now back in the 20th century as a solicitor and Jane’s doctor, Dr Hellyer, consider her ‘case’. And it’s not an abstract discussion. Jane is on trial for travelling to Dr Perrigan’s house (he, of course, lives in England), trying to reason with him and, when he refused to stop his research, Jane is accused of shooting him dead and trying to burn the house down.
The solicitor and the doctor are reviewing the document we have just read to assess its usefulness in Jane’s murder trial now coming up. They conclude that the entire thing must have been a very vivid hallucination.
But the details of their discussion don’t matter so much because the story now reveals the Twist In Its Tail. And that is – that Dr Perrigan had a son, also a doctor, also a research scientist, and… he has vowed to carry on his father’s work!! You can’t change Destiny. Men will be exterminated.
Odd (1961)
Mr Aster is the main beneficiary of Sir Sir Andrew Vincell’s will. The latter’s solicitor, young Mr Fratton is curious. After a few professional meetings, the lawyer very discreetly enquires how Mr Aster knew Sir Andrew. They go for dinner at his club and the latter tells him the story.
One night he saw a distinguished old man clinging on to a railing looking dazed. He decided to help out, addressed the man and took him to the nearest pub for a brandy. Here the story comes out (so it is a story within a story).
Sir Andrew has been knocked down by a tram and this has somehow freed his mind and sent it 50 years forward in time. This dazed man is discovered in the street by Aster who buys him a drink and talks to him. The man is stunned by his appearance in the pub mirror and disbelieves the pub calendar and even the contents of his own pockets. None of it makes sense to a man who half an hour earlier was 23 and living in 1906. But, as Aster points out from the card in the pocket of his lovely jacket, he is now clearly a director of a plastics company. ‘What is plastic?’ Sir Andrew asks him, and Aster proceeds to tell him as much as he knows while the publican orders them a cab. Then Aster accompanies the dazed man to his very smart apartments in Bloomsbury Square. Next day he calls and is answered by a young lady who assures him Sir Andrew is fine and that’s the last he hears from him till he read his obituary in the papers and was contacted by his solicitor.
Basically, although neither man can credit it, the story is obviously true. Sir Andrew Vincell did have a mysterious accident which propelled his spirit 50 years forward in time, at which point he learned about the mysterious new material ‘plastic’, before somehow being sent back to his original time, to 1906, where, as a young man, he used the knowledge he had acquired in the future to set up a successful company.
And then, many many years later, left a huge sum to the man who came across him in his dazed, mind-transported state and was not only kind and caring to him, but gave him the technical secrets on which his fortune was subsequently based.
Oh, Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? (1961)
Remember the short story about dragons in Jizzle? How the main thing about it was the very Welsh accents and locutions of everyone involved. Well, this story continues Wyndham’s interest in accents and attempts to do something similar for Ireland. Peggy MacRafferty lives in a small rural Irish community of Barranacleugh. From out the blue Peggy receives a letter asking her to appear on a quiz show produced by Popular Amalgamated Television, Ltd which is going to take place in the Town Hall at Ballyloughrish.
So Peggy takes a bus there, is welcomed, put at ease in the green room with all the the contestants and when it comes her turn to answer questions not only answers them correctly but is spirited and independent enough to cow the flashy presenter and win the hearts of the audience.
This prompts some other enterprising TV producers to take her up and fly her to London with a view to making her a movie star. We see the conversations among these hopeful producers (Mr Robbins), the flash hotel she’s put up in, the team who look after her make-up and buy her suitable dresses (led by Mrs Trump) and the irritable photographer, Bert, who makes her look like a glamour doll, before she is introduced to the powerful movie producer George Floyd, his partner Solly de Kopf and his henchman Al Foster. George and Solly decide Peggy has a certain look and presence so they’ll sign her up to ‘Plantagenet Pictures’ and trial her in a piece of stereotyped slush movie which they begin sketching out, and there’s some satirical comedy to be had from the decision to give plain Peggy the more romantic-sounding screen name of Deirdre Shilsean!
In other words, the story purports to take us into the heart of the British TV and movie industry circa 1960.
Next thing Peggy knows she’s flown off to a fashionable spa resort, Marinstein, somewhere in Germany (or Austria), complete with fairy castle, moonlight on the river etc. Peggy’s arrival here signals the start of part two because, like so many of Wyndham’s stories, this one seems almost as if two completely different plots have been welded together.
Having spent the first half following Peggy from a rural Irish village to the heart of London’s movie business, the story now switches focus and gives us a whole load of information about the founder of the Chaline Beauty Company, the enterprising Madame Letitia Chaline (real name Lettice Sheukelman). There is a page of satire about the self-appointed mission of beauty product designers to liberate womankind from the shackles of ugliness (touching directly on a central strand in the novel The Trouble With Lichen) before we move on to consider Madame Letitia’s daughter, Cathy, who married an impoverished aristocrat, and became Her Highness the Grand Duchess Katerina of Marinstein. She discovers it’s a rundown squalid dump, the castle is as cosy as a suite of caves and the inhabitants filthy, and only interested in drinking, begging and shagging.
So young Cathy sets out to comprehensively modernise and update it, concreting the airport runway, building new grand hotels, making the population attend compulsory lectures about hygiene and manners.
Ten years this is the world-famous paradise of beauty treatment in which Peggy arrives, soon making friends with another young would-be starlet, Pat aka Carla Carlita. They wander through the quaint cobbled streets packed with boutiques and salons. Next day they begin their ‘Screen Beauty Course’ to bring them in line with late 1950s movie ideas of beauty.
There is Miss Higgins for elocution, Miss Carnegie the personality coach, her coiffeur, her facial-artist, her deportment-instructor, her dietician, and Miss Arbuthnot who explains that the modern ideal of beauty requires a figure of 42-22-38. Goodness!
Then the point of view cuts back to the office of George Floyd and Solly de Kopf for the comic denouement, which is that George went to meet the plane back from Marinstein, and all the women looked the same. All of them have been turned into identikit Lolos (referring, I assume, to 1950s dolly bird movie star Gina Lollobrigida). Peggy from Barranacleugh must be among them but they are all so indistinguishable, George can’t find her and throws up his hands in despair.
Stitch in Time (1961)
Old Mrs Thelma Dolderson is sitting in her wheelchair, out on the lawn of the fine old house where she’s lived as child, young woman, married woman and now old woman. It was her son, Harold, who kept it in the family when, after the war, it became too large to run, by persuading his firm to buy it on the condition his mother retained a wing and rooms of her own. Subsequently the rest of the house has been converted into offices and laboratories where Harold pursues his researches.
(Country houses converted into research facilities are a recurring trope in Wyndham, namely the Grange in the Midwich Cuckoos where the alien children end up being housed and educated, and the Grange in the short story Una, where the mad inventor carries out his experiments in vivisection.)
Earlier in the day, Harold had tried to explain to Mrs D about the experiment they were planning to carry out this afternoon, something to do with time being an additional dimension. She doesn’t understand him but pats his hand approvingly and he leaves her sitting out in the lovely warm sun and she falls to reminiscing about her life, how odd and arbitrary life is, why it was on a summer’s day much like this, fifty or so years ago that she waited for Arthur, the love of her life, to pop over for tennis although they both knew he was coming to finally pop the question and ask her to marry him (full name: Arthur Waring Batley).
But he never showed. No explanation, no note, no nothing, he never got in touch, she never saw him again. Eventually she got over it and married Colin Dolderson who fathered her two wonderful children, Harold and Cynthia, but what if…
There is a strange shimmer in the air, a barely audible humming and then, to her amazement, Mrs Dolderson hears a familiar voice singing a tune from way back when and into view comes Arthur, spitting image of what he looked like all those decades ago… Yep it’s another story about time travel and things that might have been.
For Arthur realises something is wrong: it’s the same house but the flowerbed and creepers have changed, the trees are all bigger, there are new houses in what to be the empty field beyond. And who is this old lady in a wheelchair? Mrs Dolderson realises what has happened and adapts remarkably well. She pats his hand while Arthur feels increasingly sick and panicky. She asks him the date and he says 27 June 1913. Slowly she passes over her copy of The Times, with its date – 1 July 1963.
With a shock young Arthur in his blazer and boater realises that she, this wrinkled old wheelchair-bound lady, is the love of his life Thelma and he bursts into tears. Mrs Dolderson reaches out to stroke his hair and with the other hand reaches for the bell on the table.
She wakes in her bed. She’s had a relapse and been carried there where she was sedated by their doctor, Dr Sole. Now we have the full explanation, which we had sort of guessed anyway. Harold and his team turned on their time transporter at just the moment Arthur appeared and walked up the path, walking right into the little force field which catapulted him 50 years into the future. With Mrs Dolderson sedated, Dr Sole administered a mild sedative to Arthur to calm him down and then Harold and his team questioned him, discovering he really was from the world 50 years earlier. At which point, after some discussion, they decided the decent thing to do was give him the chance of returning back to his time. They weren’t sure the time machine could do it but determined to give it a jolly good try, told a still-weeping dazed Arthur to walk along the same path and he disappeared, just like that.
Back to that day 50 years ago when he quite obviously turned right round, got on his bicycle and never came back. A few years later Mrs Dolderson read about him being awarded a DSO in the Great War. Then she married Colin Dolderson. Now she reflects to her son, as he sits by her bedside, that it’s almost as if the course of events is written somehow and cannot be evaded (the same kind of conclusion the protagonists in any number of time travelling stories could have told her).
Time travel stories can be the opportunity for all manner of topics or issues or angles. It is entirely characteristic of Wyndham’s that his time travel stories focus on love and romance.
Random Quest (1961)
Colin Trafford works at an experimental institute. One afternoon an experiment is being conducted with some advanced device when there is bang, a flash of light, and Colin finds himself lying in darkness under several bodies. Looking up he sees a bus towering over him, pulls aside the unconscious woman lying on him, slowly realises the bus has ploughed into a shop window in Regent Street and he was caught up in the smash. He pulls himself free as the ambulances start to arrive and staggers to the Cafe Royal for a fortifying drink (the same place one of the groups of blind people in Triffids head for). But when he catches sight of himself in a mirror he gets a shock; he’s got a moustache. The Café doesn’t seem the same as usual. When he goes to pay the barman accepts a ridiculously small sum. Colin checks in his wallet and discovers a card but no mention of the EPI. On an impulse he phones the EPI but they have no record of him. He phones his own address but is not known there. So then phones the number on the card in his pocket, it works but rings and rings.
He walks along Piccadilly and is looking in the shop window of Hatchards the booksellers when he notices a book in the display by him! He’s never written a book. A voice hails him. It’s a friend he knew at Cambridge and knows was wounded in the war. They go for a drink, the other guy gossips about the ins and outs of the book world, but it’s all gibberish to Colin. Then he notices his friend’s hand. He knows for a fact he lost the last two fingers in the war. But now they’ve been magically restored. Worried about his funny questions and responses, his friend recommends going to see a doctor.
Finally Colin decides to go ‘home’ to the address on his car. It’s a nice apartment in a nice modern block but is completely unknown to him. There’s a study with a collection of books by him and he sits down and starts to read one. He’s interrupted by a key in the lock. It is his ‘wife’, Ottolie, as he goes to ‘greet’ her he realises he doesn’t even know her name. She’s barely got in with some shopping before the phone rings and it’s another woman. It takes a number of misunderstandings before he realises the woman on the phone is his mistress and the woman in the hall, his wife, knows about her but is upset at this flagrant phone conversation in front of her.
So: It is another Wyndham story about not exactly time travel, but the travel of a mind from the present day into the body of someone similar, either in the future, or in a parallel, alternative history.
Wyndham had described a relatively small jump across parallel timelines in the story Opposite Number where the different timelines only seemed to differ in that the couple at the centre of the story had married different people. Random Quest is on a much larger scale. In this alternative timeline Colin has been transported to, the Second World War never happened. Winston Churchill isn’t particularly well known, the absence of wartime inflation means everything is much cheaper, and the Germans are friendly allies who have just developed atomic fission.
Second point: All this is told as a narrative to a Dr Harshom. This doctor has learned that Trafford has been making enquiries all over England for an Ottolie Harshom. Well, Harshom is such a rare name that this doctor happens to know a number of Harshom branches around the country and several have mentioned getting letters from this Trafford fellow enquiring after an Ottolie Harshom, is there such a woman? Dr Harshom knows there is not and so has proactively invited Trafford down to his country home (gravel drive and manservant named Stephens) for a glass of sherry, a good dinner, and then a long, long conversation in the drawing room.
After a lot of hesitation, Trafford tells him the story summarised above. So why is he looking for this Ottolie Harshom? Because in the three brief weeks that he lived in the parallel timeline, Colin fell deeply in love with his ‘wife’ who was herself amazed at the change in her husband, from heartless philanderer to considerate lover, they both fell deeply for each other and then, one night… Trafford went to sleep in bed next to Ottolie and woke up alone in his bed back in ‘normal’ England. And that is why, he explains, to a slightly boggling Dr Harshom, he has set out on a quest to find the love of his life, to see if she even exists in this timeline, maybe Ottlie won’t be her name but… he won’t give up.
The good doctor listens to all this, including a page or so explanation of quantum physics, with atoms popping into and out of existence all the time, with our modern understanding that the universe is not rational and completely law-abiding, but inextricably linked with randomness. Trafford stays the night in the spare room, is given a hearty breakfast next morning, and goes on his way.
Two years later Dr Harshom receives a postcard from Canada with the simple message: ‘I found her’. There’s still a bit more story, though, for Trafford returns for a second interview with Harshom and takes a while explaining what happened. In Canada he tracked down a woman named Belinda Gale, fortunately unmarried – the exact equivalent of ‘Ottlie’ only in this timestream, is stricken with love for her and sets about slowly wooing her.
But the real twist in the tail is that, as he now explains, in conversation with Belinda’s mother, Mrs Gale, Trafford makes a momentary slip and refers to Belinda as Ottolie. Her mother turns pale with fright, and tells Trafford that nobody knows that is what she planned to call her daughter. And then reveals that Belinda is the daughter of Dr Harshom’s son, Malcolm, who got Mrs Gale pregnant but then she learned he had been killed in the war, and soon after she fell in love with another man, Reggie Gale, before she knew she was pregnant and moved to Canada with him.
At which point, with a dramatic flourish, Trafford tells Dr Harshom to prepare to meet his grand-daughter!
A Long Spoon (1960)
One of Wyndham’s rather heavily jocose stories, in which a young chap, Stephen Tramon, experimenting with playing tape spools backwards accidentally summons a very earnest demon named Batruel. The backward tape, slowed down, has accidentally played The Word of Power and the odds and ends of tape Stephen had chucked on the floor have accidentally formed the shape of a pentangle, traditional shape for invoking demons. Ooops.
After a brief explanation, and once Stephen has gotten over his initial shock, the demon accepts it was a mistake and prepares to leave except that… Stephen doesn’t know The Word of Dismissal. Double oops.
The situation is played for laughs – Batruel explains there is a taxi rank system of demons awaiting being called to earth and describes how busy they were in the 17th and 18th centuries, although things fell off badly during the 19th; they consider calling the local victim round to perform an exorcism but Batruel explains that that can be excruciatingly painful, so they decide against it – as Stephen and his young wife Dilys struggle to find a way to send the demon back where he came from without being accidentally damned in the process.
In the event they come up with a simple enough scam – the football pools. Batruel fixes a number of key matches to ensure Stephen’s predictions come true and he wins the pools jackpot three weeks in a row, pocketing a princely £655,000.
At which point Stephen pays a visit – in his new Bentley – to the headquarters of Gripshaw’s Pools, taking along his snappily dressed ‘advisor’, Batruel and being shown into the office of the founder and owner himself, Northerner Sam Gripshaw.
Gripshaw points out that Stephen’s series of wins is rocking the industry, a few more like that and it’ll go bankrupt. Stephen says he has a simple solution for that, and introduces Batruel who goes through his ‘temptation’ spiel like a pro: If Gripshaw will sell his soul to the devil, Stephen will stop using Batruel to fix the games’ results. In fact Batruel will disappear back to hell.
To Batruel and Stephen’s surprise, Gripshaw reads through the contract and agrees without hesitation. A penknife is fetched so that Gripshaw can sign the contract in his own blood, then they tie a handkerchief round the wound, Batruel performs a deep bow and disappears.
Stephen is surprised, but Gripshaw leans forward and lets him in on a secret. Tut tut those demons are most inefficient and old-fashioned. If and when Batruel goes to store Gripshaw’s contract in their filing system he’ll get a bit of a shock – he’ll discover Gripshaw has already signed a contract with the Devil. How do you think he got the capital to set up his business in the first place!?
And so this final collection of Wyndham short stories ends, as so many of his stories do, on a comic note.
Credit
Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham was published by Michael Joseph in 1961. All references are to the 1974 Penguin paperback edition (recommended retail price 30p).
Related link
John Wyndham reviews
- Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
- The Day of the Triffids (1951)
- The Kraken Wakes (1953)
- Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
- The Chrysalids (1955)
- The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
- The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
- The Outward Urge (1959)
- Trouble with Lichen (1960)
- Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
- Chocky (1968)
- Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the latter’s invention, an anti-gravity material they call ‘Cavorite’, to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites, leading up to its chasteningly moralistic conclusion
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ – until one of them rebels
1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover unimaginable strangeness
1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic, Ransom, and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold
1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psycho-historian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ from outer space which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships passing over the ocean deeps, gruesome attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, the melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a chapter-length dry run for The Chrysalids
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by the lingering radiation. But as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, but when he and his mind-melding friends are discovered, they are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1956 The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham – 11 science fiction short stories, mostly humorous, satirical, even farcical, but two or three (Survival, Dumb Martian and Time To Rest) which really cut through and linger.
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a relatively conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story
1960s
1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a century or so hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like Mothers into whose body a bewildered twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head who it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents is real and a telepathic explorer from a far distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in retrospect, in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’
1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same pattern, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that his dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better, with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much interplanetary travel
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender
1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians in the so-called ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself ‘President Manson’, revived an old nuclear power station to light up Las Vegas and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer
1990s
1990 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin
2000s
2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set in London and featuring many of the characters from its immediate predecessor, namely Milgrim the drug addict and ex-rock singer Hollis Henry
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children
Books & Boots 