Signal-boosting — Call For Female Writers From Obverse Books
I was about to post a short review of Lawrence Burton’s excellent Faction Paradox novel and Phil Purser-Hallard’s equally excellent Senor 105 novella (a post which will go up tomorrow or Monday instead), when I went to the Obverse Books website to get links to put in the post, and saw this.
Obverse are putting out, next year, an anthology of Faction Paradox short stories, and it’s to be written entirely by women. From the FAQ:
Are unpublished women writers welcome?
Extremely! I’ll be setting up an (optional) online workshop so that the anthology’s contributors can read and give feedback on each others’ work.
If you have not previously been published, please include the first thousand words of your story with your pitch.
Why an all-woman anthology?The majority of the writers published by Obverse so far have been men. This anthology is an attempt to circumvent whatever barriers are preventing Obverse from connecting with a larger number of talented women.
I’m a transwoman. Can I pitch?
Absolutely! You too, genderqueer folks.
What do I need to know about Faction Paradox to write for this anthology?Other than what’s in this document – pretty much nothing! I’ll provide Faction-related content in the form of small stories that fit between each story in the anthology, featuring Tefen and Triphis and their competition. However, if you are familiar with the series, feel free to use its mythology in your pitch.
If you would like to know more, Lawrence Miles’ introduction to his creation is online at:What genres and styles of short story can I pitch?
Each story needs a strong science fiction or fantasy element. We might see the Earth conquered by extraterrestrials, machines, memes, ghosts, mermaids, intelligent cosmic rays, mutant dogs, gods from a parallel dimension… the more original and weird your invasion force, the better. (Please avoid these heavily used fantasy creatures: vampires, werewolves, fairies, dragons, and zombies.)
However, the stories can present that SF/fantasy element within any genre: romance, horror, comedy, espionage, adventure, police procedural, technothriller, historical intrigue, psychological drama, you name it.
Any setting on Earth is appropriate, and any time, past, present, or future. The well-researched use of non-Western settings, culture, and mythology is encouraged. Characters of colour, characters with disabilities, and characters with alternative sexualities are also welcome. Adult content is fine, but please avoid sexual violence and child sexual abuse.
The stories can be told from the point of view of the subjugated humans – victims, collateral damage, resistance, collaborators, dupes, ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives – or from the POV of the conquerors; but each story will show some of the consequences of colonisation for the human race.
Now, I think this would be a perfect anthology for several of the women I know to submit to. Note especially that *you do not need to know much about Faction Paradox* in order to submit. I also think that this is something that should be supported wholeheartedly — Obverse are a company that put out great work, and it’s always good to see people consciously trying to fix an imbalance.
I’ve not mentioned this before, because the book’s not even finished yet, so there’s every possibility they’ll turn down the finished manuscript and make me look foolish, but the novel I’ve been working on is for Obverse, and I also have a short story in contention for a possible future anthology they’re putting out. I say this just to let people know that I’ve had dealings with two different Obverse editors as a writer, and they are very, very easy people to work with.
Tiredblogging: The Anchoring Of The Thread (or, Towards A Grand Unified Theory Of Time-Travel In Doctor Who)
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a week now, and been putting it off until I’m less tired. But then I realised that if I hadn’t been less tired in a week, I probably wouldn’t be any time soon. So, here’s my Grand Unified Theory Of Time In Doctor Who, as written by someone who had to take four goes to type the word time because he’s so tired.
I’d been thinking about this for a while (and talked about bits of it with Plok while he was here), but this blog post by Eliezer Yudkowsky, about causality and time travel, gave me the final key. You might want to read that before we go ahead. I’ll wait.
OK, so one of the big things in Doctor Who since Moffat took over is the way that time can be changed, pretty much willy-nilly, when in the old series the rule was, more or less, “you can’t change history, not one line!”
Now, there are various explanations that can be used of this, not least the one I use, which is “they’re two different series with only the loosest possible connection.”
But suppose you want to reconcile them. The usual fanwank explanation is “the Time War” — and I’m going to use that, too. But that doesn’t actually *explain* anything. So I’m going to try.
And I think it can be done.
First, we assume that the uni/multiverse is — or started as — something like the timeless universe of Julian Barbour, or the ultimate ensemble of Max Tegmark. A timeless configuration space of every existing possibility, all equally existent. Every instant of time, existing simultaneously.
In one of these instants, exists an intelligent race. They’re known by various names, such as the Great Houses, but we can call them the Time Lords, because along with them comes the existence of time.
You see, time isn’t something that exists in itself. Time is just another word for the increase in entropy between different states in the configuration space. But since we can (as far as we know) draw a line between any two states, why should entropy increase?
Well, probabilistically, it’s simple. If you take any random point in a configuration space — whatever the point — and make a random perturbation to it, the result will, in the huge majority of cases, have more entropy than the original position. So a random walk among configurations will lead to an increase in entropy.
But we’re not talking about a random walk — we’re talking about a lawlike universe. And if you draw a line between the start and end points, why does it have to have that direction? Why not say that the end is the start and the start is the end?
Well, you can — but not in a universe containing intelligence. Intelligence is, fundamentally, the creation of an isomorphism between one structure (e.g. a brain) and another (e.g. a universe) such that the first can predict the second.
In order to do this, information has to pass from the universe to the brain — and by doing so, entropy in the universe has to increase proportionally.
So in any universe which contains intelligence, that intelligence, at any given point, will have knowledge of a universe which has slightly less entropy than the one in which it’s existing, and so perceive entropy as always increasing. Hence — arrow of time.
So with our Time Lords comes an arrow of time.
Now, what do we know of the Time Lords? Firstly, that they put all of history in place with the Anchoring Of The Thread (see the Book Of The War) and secondly that they could travel through time.
As Yudkowsky points out, if you’re looking at the standard formulation of causality, using Directed Acyclic Graphs, as formulated by Judea Pearl, then you can *either* have cause and effect, *or* you can have a consistent, single-history universe which contains time travel, but you can’t have both.
So, assuming for the moment that current understanding is more-or-less correct, and the universe can be understood or modelled as a computation, then we have a rough idea of what sort of process the Anchoring Of The Thread must have been — a brute-force sweep through all possible events, noting the ones that fit the consistent history the Time Lords wanted, which were then forced together — possibly just by the Time Lords’ perception — into one history. This allowed consistent time travel throughout their history, without the possibility of paradox (or of wiping themselves out of history) but with the disadvantage that there was actually no such thing as cause-and-effect — effects *appeared* to follow causes, but that’s only because they’d been put in that position by the Time Lords.
(It’s possible that Time Lords themselves (and their companions when in a TARDIS?) had the ability to alter the universe on the fly with their perceptions. If so this would mean that time-travellers were the only beings in the universe with true free will — and would explain the changes to time-travellers’ biodata (a concept often mistranslated as ‘DNA’ in the new series). It’s also possible that the computation that put history in place had something to do with the calculations of Logopolis.)
Then comes the Time War. The Time Lords are destroyed. They’re no longer there to perceive the universe, and without their computation to keep it in place, there can’t be a consistent timeline any longer.
However, there *are* still intelligences — humans, Daleks and so on — and at least some of them have time machines. This means that time must still exist. Without the influence of the Time Lords, that means that we have a universe where the past and future are both malleable — but where effects have causes, and thus actions have consequences.
So because the Time Lords have been destroyed, free will has been given to the inhabitants of the universe. They’re no longer just puppets acting out a script planned by superpowerful gods, but people whose actions *matter*. Given the Doctor’s known attitude toward free will, the question is possibly not so much why he destroyed the Time Lords (if, indeed, it was ‘really’ him who did so), as why he didn’t do it much earlier.
And as a side-note, the fact that the universe no longer runs to a fixed plan with an intelligence behind it might go some way to explaining the incoherence of many post-Time War stories…
I hope that makes some kind of sense, or at least the right kind of nonsense. I can’t actually see right now, I’m so tired, so it may not. There’ll be another Who post, on Kinda, on the Mindless Ones tomorrow or Friday, and a Beach Boys post this weekend.
Faction Paradox: Burning With Optimism’s Flame
I don’t have much time for blog posting at the moment, but I couldn’t let the release of the latest Faction Paradox short story collection go without at least a short review.
(Ob. disclaimer — I know several of the authors in this collection, as well as the publisher, in a friendly-on-Twitter-and-Facebook kind of way. However, I got to know these people, in most part, because of my admiration for their work, and so I don’t believe that me knowing them is biasing me towards liking their work more. But it’s better to say these things upfront.)
That this is a book geared to my tastes should be obvious from the very title. I love the Faction Paradox books anyway, but this is named after a song by XTC, one of my favourite bands. The table of contents confirms that the high expectations are justified — we have new stories by four of the authors of The Book Of The War, Philip Purser-Hallard, Simon Bucher-Jones, Jonathan Dennis and Kelly Hale, all of whom are writers whose other works I’ve enjoyed as well. There are also stories by Elizabeth Evershed and Helen Angove, two of the new writers from Purser-Hallard’s Tales Of The City whose stories I singled out for special praise when I reviewed that, and there’s actually a story by Aditya Bidikar, who first became interested in Faction Paradox after reading one of my blog posts about it.
Overall, the tone here is darker than previous Faction works. While the earlier Faction and Faction-related books are very much on the borderline between SF and Fantasy, with an admixture of historical adventure, here the stories are often little horror miniatures, of a type that would not seem too out of place in the old Pan Books Of Horror Stories — creepy little tales with a black sense of humour. Which, of course, fits the Faction milieu perfectly.
I won’t look at every story in the collection individually — there are some about which I have less to say than others — but all are worth reading. But I’ll talk a little about the ones that I actually have things to say about:
Raleigh Dreaming by Elizabeth Evershed is so different from the other story of hers I’ve read (The Socratic Problem) that it’s hard to believe they’re by the same writer. Some motifs reappear — famous people from wildly different historical time-periods coming together, for example — but the prose style here is very different, cleverly managing to suggest the 16th century patterns of speech of its narrator without ever slipping into archaism. And the method of time travel involved is a lovely little touch (I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it — always a danger when talking about short stories much more than novels — but it’s funny, clever, and perfectly appropriate). A worthy opener.
Wing Finger by Helen Angove reminded me quite a bit of Lawrence Miles’ Grass in its central idea, but Angove takes the idea in a very different direction. The redemption of the narrator, who is a zealot, a coward and a fool until it counts, is beautifully done, and Angove does a wonderful job of pastiching Regency-era prose styles.
Squatter’s Rights by Juliet Kemp is one of the creepiest short horror stories I’ve read in a long time, especially because the trap in it sounds so seductive at first.
After The Velvet Eon by Simon Bucher-Jones is the story here that, more than any of the others, needed to be told as a Faction Paradox story. Probably the best-structured of the stories, this is time-travel, emotional storytelling and folk-tale combined in a way that Steven Moffat wishes he could. There’s a love of language here that’s characteristic of Bucher-Jones’ work, too — “St Vermis’ Star”, for example, is just a wonderful touch.
Remake/Remodel by Jonathan Dennis sees the welcome return of Faction Hollywood, one of my favourite things from The Book Of The War. A creepy/funny story about desperation for stardom, the film industry and changing tastes in superheroes, as well as about conceptual entities.
Dharmayuddha by Aditya Bidikar is the story I’d have written if I knew anything about Hindu philosophy. I mean that literally — I was scared by some of the ways this parallels something I’ve been writing, and it sparked off all sorts of ideas that had already been sort-of lurking in my brain. This story manages to meld the Hindu idea of the Yugas perfectly with something that’s been hinted at in various Faction books, and expands the mythology beautifully.
A Star’s View Of Caroline by Sarah Hadley is… problematic for me, in that the criteria I judge it by may not be the criteria other people do. As a Faction Paradox story it works very well, although there is an element in the character PJ of a sort of fetishising of learning disabilities that one sometimes finds and which I’m not entirely comfortable with. But it tells the kind of story one hopes for in a Faction Paradox story — one involving the way our thoughts affect the world, the way the media affect our thoughts, and how those things all affect what is possible — very well.
The problem is that it’s set in what seems to be a generic skiffy post-apocalyptic background, but it’s one which will be very familiar to viewers of a certain TV show. And the story’s conclusion, which is enormously powerful, draws much of its power from association with two scenes from old black-and-white episodes of that show, one from 1964 and one from 1965. And I have no idea how someone who hasn’t seen those nearly-fifty-year-old black-and-white episodes of an old science fiction programme will react.
Now in some ways, this is a good thing — there is nothing in the story that requires you to have seen, or even to have heard of, those old stories. It works as a self-contained story, as far as I can tell, and the resonances with those other stories only add to its power. But it does mean that I can’t judge how well this would read to someone who hadn’t seen them.
And De Umbris Idearum by Philip Purser-Hallard is the story I would have *liked* to have written out of all these. It’s the first time, I think, that Purser-Hallard has ventured out of his own section of the Faction ‘mythos’ — the City Of The Saved, which he created and has written several stories and a novel about — and written something based on some of the other ideas from the Faction books. Airbrushing can be done with Luminess Air. Here he takes on the Remote and Remakes, two ideas I’ve been wanting to see more exploration of, and uses them to tell a multiply-nested story of three priests, from three different time periods, which revolves around a theological conundrum about the nature of original sin. Whether intentionally or not, it ties together several themes from other stories in the collection very cleverly (the interference with the Earth’s scientific development in Wing-Finger is similar to some of the events here, the story is structured like the Russian dolls from Office Politics, and so on), while dealing with many of Purser-Hallard’s own usual themes.
Those eight stories only make up a little over half the book — the other six stories all have things to recommend them as well. This is a very, very impressive collection, and you should all buy it. It’s available from Obverse Books as a hardback or an ebook
So What’s Faction Paradox Actually About?
This is less of an essay, more a stream of consciousness braindump that I’m going to type until I fall asleep on the keyboard. I’m too tired today to write my Mindless Ones piece, and certainly too tired to work on the other projects I’m working on, so I’m going to dump a lot of thoughts I’ve been having here, specifically about the vision of the Faction Paradox ‘universe’ presented in Dead Romance, This Town Will Never Let Us Go and (what I take to be) Lawrence Miles’ parts of The Book of the War. Faction Paradox is the work of multiple writers, all of them very good, but here I’m going to look at a thread in, specifically, Miles’ writing. I’m writing this now so I can come back to it later and sift it for the good stuff…
So anyway… the Singularity.
I first came across the argument used by Singulatarians (who despite the name are not Doctor Who villains, although Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to aspire to being one) in the preface to a Robert A Heinlein book, which I read when I was 14 or so but which was written in the 1950s. In this he plots a chart of the top speed attainable by human beings, and shows that up to about 1800 it was maybe 20 miles per hour, then after the railways it was 50mph, and then there were jet planes, and then rockets…
Heinlein goes on to say that most people would predict progress to flatten off or continue at the same rate, but that while he didn’t necessarily believe the result you’d obtain “the correct way to extend an exponential curve is exponentially” and that that prediction said that by the year 2000 we’d be travelling faster than the speed of light.
Of course, as we now know, humanity’s top speed essentially plateaud right at the moment Heinlein wrote those words, because when looking at physical events, rather than mathematical ones, the proper way to extend an exponential curve is as a sigmoid, because rather annoyingly the real world has far fewer infinities in it than mathematics does.
In the 1990s and 2000s, this argument was used by people who were actually in many ways Heinlein’s intellectual heirs — usually right-wing libertarian technofetishists — but with speed replaced by information processing. The argument, as laid out in such books as The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, runs roughly thus — two hundred years ago, there were no computers. Sixty years ago, there was one computer. Now, there are loads of computers. Therefore, by wishful thinking mathematical induction, soon there will be infinitely many computers, and we can all go and live in them as software ghosts and make the entire universe into a computer.
There’s more to the argument than that — well, to be accurate, there’s more to some versions of the argument than that, Kurzweil himself being the kind of cretin who seriously argues that in a post-scarcity economy where anyone can have all the material goods they need without expropriating others simply by pressing a button, some sort of mechanism to protect intellectual property would become necessary — but that’s the basis of it.
(What’s this got to do with Faction Paradox? I’ll get there, but I’ll take the long way round).
And speaking of right-wing libertarian idiots, in 1992 Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of political thinking by a great political theorist, it was in fact for the most part a restatement of the ideas of those great thinkers Sellar and Yeatman — “America was thus clearly Top Nation, and history came to a .”
(In fact, in 2002, Fukuyama came into conflict with the singularity people, because he wrote a book called Our Posthuman Future, which as far as I can tell from the summaries I’ve read (reading one book by that idiot is enough for me for this lifetime, I think) says “we’d better stop doing science, in case we accidentally have some more history).
The difference was that Sellar and Yeatman thought that America coming out on top was A Bad Thing, because obviously Britain is best, whereas Fukuyama’s book argued that it was, in fact, A Good Thing.
America taking on Britain’s old role and destiny in the world, leaving Britain purposeless, with British imperialism being revealed as a rather shabby thing — hold that thought for me, before it drifts away.
So anyway, the bit about speed (you remember the bit about speed?) is essentially the basis for all science fiction before about 1980ish. We can quibble about dates and how general that is and so on, but in pop-culture terms, certainly, it’s true to say that SF was the literature of fast travel. It’s practically a cliche now to point out that as well as being about Marxism and eugenics, The Time Machine was about bicycling (Wells clearly modelled his machine on the bicycle), but it’s no coincidence that the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of SF was also the period when the human race’s top speed was increasing. In a handful of generations, the horizons of normal people went from an area a few miles across to, potentially, the world. If that continued, why, we’d reach the stars in no time — and given how strange the people in those other countries were, what kind of people would we find out there? It’s a literature of exploration, whether in time or in space.
Post-1980 SF is, on the other hand, more concerned about the idea of the Singularity, in a very loose sense. Writers like Greg Egan, for example, will write whole novels about the implications of ‘uploading’ one’s consciousness into a computer, or about how faster-than-light travel becomes unnecessary when one can spawn multiple immortal copies and send them through space by radio wave, then merge the copies when they get together again. Post 1980, SF has been about information processing, far more than about travel.
Doctor Who was actually in a perfect position to go in this direction in 1980. While Christopher H Bidmead was script editor of the show, there was an extraordinary run of stories (roughly from State Of Decay through Logopolis) which dramatised perfectly ideas from mathematics, information theory and cybernetics, but in a BBC costume drama sense in which these abstract ideas were reified as places and environments.
It was utterly unlike anything else in SF that I’ve come across (though Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has some of the same flavour, or would have had he had an editor who could have cut three quarters of the book out). The closest piece of TV I’ve ever seen to this run of stories is Jonathan Miller’s The Drinking Party, which like the Bidmead stories basically sticks Plato on screen, though Miller’s film has fewer vampires and aliens in it. Bidmead’s version of the show also followed neatly from some elements of the show up to that point (basically, all those stories either written by David Whitaker or Robert Holmes or directed by David Maloney) (another way of phrasing that parenthetical would be ‘the good ones’).
But then Bidmead left the show, and after some of the usual musical chairs in the Doctor Who production office he was replaced by Eric Saward, whose style has been aptly described by Alex Wilcock as “guns with a capital GUNS!”
The show had lost its way, and from then on no matter how good the TV show or the books and audios based on it were (and sometimes they’ve been very, very, very good), they’ve not escaped from the 1960s paradigm of travel and expansion. The brief promise of a Platonist, intellectual, progressive show was recplaced by one that would always be stuck in the past, and one that would always be materialist in the crude sense.
And the Doctor Who notion of ‘future’ is likewise one that is stuck in the past, and has to be. It’s a future of spaceships and Galactic Empires, not a future of disembodied intelligences whose minds span galaxies.
But of course, a cybernetic, game-theoretic, information-driven view of the world has its own problems as well.
So in the Faction Paradox universe, humanity’s destiny, which was always to transcend the material and become, essentially, gods, has been diverted by the Time Lords Great Houses, at some time around the early 21st century. A few quotes here from The Book Of The War (which you should all own already), specifically the entry on humanity. I’m assuming these are by Miles, because they fit so well with his preoccupations, but of course many other authors contributed to that book, so they could be by any of them:
Thus, it became the prevalent belief among human societies that the body itself was a tool, an extension of the “real” inner self. The result were belief-systems centred on the idea of a soul or spirit, and as scheduled this became the cornerstone of most human progress for years to come.
Anthropologically speaking, it’s clear from this evidence what the ultimate fate of humanity should have been. With every society believing itself to be made up of spirits-trapped-in-flesh, from humankind’s earliest years there was a clear unconscious desire to leave its collective body behind and achieve a non-corporeal state…By the early-to-mid twenty-first century, intelligence-form technology was certainly in existence. All humanity needed was the will. But somehow, after millions of years of effort, the will had unexpectedly vanished. On the brink of finding its own personal kind of enlightenment, it was as if the human species had backed down and decided to enter a period of stagnation instead.
The Great Houses take over humanity’s role, becoming the embodiments of time and history in the universe, and being more like concepts than people. But they, too, stagnate — the replacement paradigm is just as stale as the old one. By creating a settled history, they literally do end history, both for humanity and for themselves. Earth is reduced to merely having an empire, not being really important, but the Great Houses turn inward and don’t bother about the universe. Because the growth of information processing is just as much a sigmoid curve as the growth of speed (and in fact, it’s about to flatline right about now).
But then an enemy appears, and manages to find a weakness in the Great Houses, who were previously thought invincible. A new concept, a way of thinking that is totally alien to them.
But that new concept isn’t the real threat… the real threat is what the Houses do to themselves when confronted by it…
The War is not, of course, the War On Terror — the concept was created years before the September 11, 2001 attacks — but Faction Paradox is at least in part about the larger cultural problems of which they were a symptom.
And I’m too tired to continue this now, so the stuff about Islam, steampunk and identity will have to wait for another of these posts.
Tales Of The City
(ob. disclaimer — I know both the editor and publisher of this book online, in a “friendly on Facebook/Twitter” kind of way. However, I got to know them because I like their books, so don’t think this is biased by that).
I haven’t been very good about reviewing the books I’ve read recently, mostly because I’ve been barely functional for a while — last night I ended up having to go to bed at half past seven in the evening, for example — but I’ve wanted to bring more attention to this one, as I think people who like my blog will really like it.
Despite his having confined his writing almost entirely to Doctor Who spin-offs, Philip Purser-Hallard is one of my very favourite science fiction writers of the last decade, in part because the preoccupations in his writing match up so well with my own (though he is genuinely good at writing about these subjects, too). From his wonderful Stapledon pastiche/critique Peculiar Lives through to the book he’s best known for, Of The City Of The Saved… and beyond, he deals with the Really Big Issues of teleology and eschatology, in a manner that is somewhat reminiscent of a saner Philip K Dick (a big influence on Purser-Hallard, who features him as a minor character in more than one of his works), but one perhaps more influenced by Teilhard than Gnosticism.
Purser-Hallard’s main vehicle for looking at these ideas is The City Of The Saved, a setting introduced in the Faction Paradox book The Book Of The War, and featured in Purser-Hallard’s only full length novel, Of The City Of The Saved…, as well as in a few short stories. Influenced by the Omega Point of Teilhard (via Tipler’s more technological version), this is a location at the end of the universe, in which every human or human-descended lifeform is resurrected, to live forever in an undamageable body. Posthuman cyborgs have to live in the same society as the oldest Australopithicenes, with all being equal and no-one being able to cause anyone else any physical harm.
Here, for the first time, in a collection edited by Purser-Hallard, other authors are allowed to play in the City, although they stick very closely to Purser-Hallard’s established style. Some new themes are introduced — in particular, there’s a recurring sense that great myths, especially the Greek myths, are being lived out in a ‘second time as farce’ kind of way, with a Cyclopean barman, the Trojan war continuing as “an endless beach party of banana-boat races and drinking bouts”, and an Icarus-alike whose wings are shoddy body-modifications.
Purser-Hallard himself provides the bookend stories, which set up and resolve several threads in the other stories, but almost everything in here is good. My particular favourites are Blair Bidmead’s Happily Ever After Is A High-Risk Strategy, a selection of traveller’s tales told by hitch-hikers and the vehicle they’re travelling in, The Socratic Problem by Elizabeth Evershed, in which a university specialising in philosophy is disrupted by the visiting Professor Sokrates, and Helen Angove’s Highbury, which starts out as a Jane Austen parody before descending into something a little darker, with a very Gothic explanation for the cultural stasis imposed on its main characters.
As with all short-story collections, Tales Of The City has its faults — some of the stories are better at atmosphere than at plot, and Dale Smith’s About A Girl, I’m afraid, leaves a bit of a bad taste (the idea of a band consisting of the various famous musicians who died aged twenty-seven isn’t a great one, but then adding in appearances from every celebrity from Albert Einstein to Philip K Dick starts to give the impression that far from being inhabited by a hundred undecillion people from throughout the history of the universe, the City Of The Saved is merely the green room for a TV chat show).
But the overall quality of the stories here is extremely high, and this is easily a match in quality for the Faction Paradox collection Obverse put out last year, which I loved. It definitely leaves me hoping for more of these collections (though I’d also like to see some more long work from Purser-Hallard in this setting).
Tales Of The City is available from Obverse Books as both a paperback and a DRM-free ebook. Buy it, not just to support an interesting small publisher, but also because it’s probably the best collection of SF stories you’ll read this year.
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