Time-travel, if done well, is one of my favourite fictional devices, and it forms the basis of the first story in Wyndham's collection: Chronoclasm. How satisfying a word is that? I bloody love it. I haven't yet determined whether it's Wyndham's own neologism, but it comes from the Ancient Greek khronos (time) and klastes (a person who breaks something). A chronoclasm is, according to the story's scatty and romantic heroine, Tavia, 'when a thing goes and happens at the wrong time because somebody was careless' - i.e., when a time traveller somehow fractures the course history should have taken. (Doctor Who, I think, is a bit of a classic chronoclast...)
Wyndham called this story a romantic comedy, and indeed it is light-hearted, shading towards silly in places. Tavia Lattery, a student from the Twenty-Second Century, receives a love-letter on her birthday, penned by her long-dead great-great-great-uncle, Gerald Lattery. Driven by curiosity, she sneaks into her university laboratory's 'history-machine', and searches Gerald out in the early Twentieth Century, much to the consternation of her fellow academics. I loved the examples of chronoclasms given in the story: of Hero demonstrating a steam-turbine at Alexandria, and Archimedes using napalm at the siege of Syrcuse. I did find myself wishing that Gerald and Tavia were a little less saccharine, but enjoyed the denoument of their romance nonetheless.
Martians cropped up in a couple of stories in the collection: Dumb Martian was my favourite of these, pitting a callous Earthman, Duncan, against a Martian woman, Lellie, whom he has purchased from her parents for the purpose of keeping him company during a five-year contract on a sub-moon of Jupiter. An allegory for racism and domestic abuse, the story explores Duncan's determination to ignore his wife's intellectual capacity, his escalating cruelty, and the revenge Lellie finally wreaks. I loved this story for its cold, silent battle of wits in its closing scenes - the breathless intensity of their hatred for one another, played out against a backdrop of the whole dark universe.
Parallel universes are another of my favourite sci-fi tropes, and in Wyndham's Opposite Number, academic Peter Ruddle is visited by an alternate version of himself and his ex-girlfriend Jean, who are most appalled to discover that they are not married in Peter's reality. It's a clever little riff about paths not taken; thought-provoking, and ultimately, I found, rather comforting.
Other stories include Pawley's Peepholes, a satirical take on time-travel as a kind of bawdy seaside attraction, and the fabulously grim Survival, in which a meek young woman politely dispatches the entire crew of a marooned spaceship. There were a couple of clangers in the collection, too - I wasn't a mad fan of Compassion Circuit, where an ailing woman is turned into a robot to preserve her mind, nor of the somewhat insipid closing story, Wild Flower, where a schoolmistress disturbed by the encroach of technology finds solace in a bunch of unusual flowers. I think the problem with both of these stories for me was that they felt underdeveloped; I didn't believe in the characters, and I didn't feel as though Wyndham believed in them either.
That said, I think that overall, this is a brilliant collection. Wyndham explains in his introduction that he wrote the stories over fifteen years as a kind of experiment, moulding the sci-fi motif to a variety of short story genres. The result is something that you don't find often with single-author collections: a clutch of stories which are consistent in voice and theme, but which are so assorted in their tone, in their handling and in their purpose, that they fly from the page in all different directions: never predictable, never tedious.
The whole experience has sent me off on a bit of a sci-fi jag: I've just received a rather stout package through the post containing H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, none of which I've read before, and all of which I've heard glittering and marvellous things about. Watch this space.
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