Science fiction’s New Wave, its experiments with form and content, and emphasis on subjective fantasies of ‘inner space’, gave my teenage addiction shape and direction. Its chief venue was the magazine New Worlds, which by the 1970s had become a series of paperback anthologies, and it was in one of those where I first read this story, which repurposes a favourite science-fictional trope, the gift of a special power, to critique SF’s fantasies of power and the state of Britain, back then, in the 1970s. The running down of the title refers to entropy, metaphorically embodied in Lyall, the accident-prone, self-pitying acquaintance of the story’s narrator, whose disasters ramp up from minor domestic accidents to the terrible end of a rancorous marriage, and a catastrophic earthquake in the Lake District. There’s no pat solution to Lyall’s plight, no practical or heroic use for the entropy he embodies. Spurning the narrator’s attempt to help him, he sets off on a crazed trek across iconic crags and peaks, triggering a geological collapse that’s quickly forgotten when a right-wing insurgency issues “from dusty suburban drill halls and Boy Scout huts” and swiftly takes over the country. Harrison’s savage irony refuses any sense of escape or triumphalism; all that’s left is the narrator’s residual guilt, and his attempt, in the story’s hauntingly lyrical last paragraph, to nullify or escape the memory of Lyall’s “final access of rage and despair” by casting backwards into the unsullied past.
First published in New Worlds 8, Sphere Books, 1975. Collected in Things That Never Happen, Night Shade Books, 2003
A Personal Anthology 