LITMIR.BIZ

      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

      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

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