‘A Way Home’ by Theodore Sturgeon

I read an awful amount of science fiction while growing up in a small Cotswold town, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An addiction chiefly fed by the local public library and, in Woolworths, trays of cheap paperbacks and magazines from the US, supposedly shipped across the Atlantic as ballast, which is where I discovered a collection by Theodore Sturgeon, and this story. Unlike that of most of his contemporaries in the so-called Golden Age of SF, Sturgeon’s fiction is emotionally complex, sometimes sexually challenging and always humane. This brief tale is barely fantasy: its dreams of escape interrogate genre fiction’s escapist stories. The protagonist (who shares my first name, which seemed significant to me back then) is a bright young boy who runs away from the suffocating milieu of his small town, where nothing much changes. When he reaches the highway, an expensive car draws up and its driver, a caricature of a self-important business man, with an exotic woman at his side and chocolate-covered cherries in the glove compartment, boasts about the fortune he’s made and asks for directions to the place he left twenty years ago, telling the boy, Paul, that he aims to give “give the folks in the old town a treat”. Paul points out the way and accepts a handful of cherries, but cherries and car vanish as he walks on, he tells himself “It’ll just be like that,” and we realise that the businessman was his fantasy of what he might become: that the narrative, a perfectly pitched parody of pulp fiction cliches, is fed by his imagination. He dreams up two more unlikely future selves – a globe-trotting hobo with a maimed hand, and the dashing pilot of a sleek aeroplane – before the town sheriff draws up in his patrol car, reality reasserts itself, and Paul decides to go home. All the other ways of getting back – making a killing on the stock market, acquiring an aeroplane, even losing his hand – would take too long, he thinks, but the sheriff’s car “would go right past his house, soon’s it got in town. Wasn’t much of a house. In it, though, was his own room. Small, but absolutely his own.”

First published in Amazing Stories, 1953. Collected in A Way Home: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1955 and Thunder and Roses, Gateway/Orion, 2003

‘Running Down’ by M. John Harrison

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

‘Hay’ by David Hayden

A concise, vividly rendered fable, presented with the dead-pan absurdism of a Buster Keaton skit. An engineer, travelling by train across the parched landscape of an unfamiliar country, sees a man floating in the air under a hay bale, and a mountain-high stack of teetering, slowly shifting bales. No one else seems to find any of this remarkable, and at his destination the engineer discovers that the mine he’s been sent to repair has been flooded with the tears of its miners: “A thousand men are sitting or standing, alone or in groups, their silvery issue sluicing across the floor: a great self-syncopating orchestra of misery.” He swiftly restores the mine to good working order and organises shifts of weeping miners to irrigate the surrounding desert, but this triumph of pragmatism is swiftly undercut by Hayden’s sly surrealism. When he returns to the now-prosperous mining town some years later, where the “sound of discrete crying arrives with the odour of ripening fruit,” the engineer sees from the balcony of the new resort hotel the tower of shifting hay and, silhouetted against the moon, a solitary man held aloft by a bale. The rational world and the world of fantasy and dream logic are equally real, but one cannot define, or be contained by, the other.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Spring 2010. Collected in Darker with the Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017

‘Useless Things’ by Maureen F. McHugh

A meticulously constructed, quietly devastating story of precarity in a day-after-tomorrow future in which drought is rendering the south-west of the US uninhabitable. The life of thoughtful liberalism the narrator hoped for is gone. She lives with her two dogs in a house she bought with the last of her savings, fears that her charity to passing migrants has made her vulnerable, worries about paying taxes and buying water, and that her business, sculpting lifelike dolls of newborn infants, may at any moment give out. There’s little drama, but the story is saturated with anxiety, a sense of things falling apart. One of the narrator’s best clients turns out to have been using her dolls as part of an odd, sad hoax; her home is broken into and one of her dogs goes missing; she buys a gun for protection, but a confrontation with a pair of migrants ends in misunderstanding rather than a shoot-out. There’s no triumph in survival, no colourful Mad-Max style anarchism, “just a couple of guys from Nicaragua or Guatemala . . . And me, sitting watching the desert go dark, the moon rising, an empty handgun in my hand.”

First published in Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2008. Collected in After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press, 2011

‘Under the Microscope’ by John Updike

In this parody of a metropolitan cocktail party, the guests are various species of ravenous, microscopic pond life and literary ambition is transformed into a stark Darwinian struggle. Updike once wanted to be a cartoonist; the original version of this jeu d’espirit, with its tipped-in artwork, zestfully aspires to that condition. It’s a shame, I think, that he decided to omit the illustrations in this and several similar experiments when they were published in the first slab of his collected oeuvre.

First published in The Transatlantic Review, Spring 1968. Collected in Museums and Women, and Other Stories, Knopf, 1972 and The Early Stories 1953 – 1975, Knopf, 2003

‘Pyramids for Minnesota’ by Thomas M. Disch

A deadpan Q&A about a proposal to build pyramids in Minnesota, subtitled A Serious Proposal.

“Q: Why Minnesota, then? Why not in a desert?

A: There, too, by all means. But, really, why not Minnesota?

Disch claimed that many readers volunteered their services to the project when the story was originally published, and reassured them that this was not a put-on: he really wanted to get together with some like-minded people, and build some pyramids. And, really, why not?

First published in Harper’s Magazine, 1974. Collected in The Man Who Had No Idea, Bantam Books, 1982

‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’ by Claire Keegan

A kind of gothic fairy tale set in a vivid, sexually charged conjuration of rural Ireland. A pubescent girl refuses to conform to the expected norms of her farming family and its community, precisely evoked by her lively narrative voice. She becomes part of the logging crew helmed by her father, and when she falls for the new lumberjack, a gentle, slow-witted giant, the story takes a turn into darker territory. The girl acts on her fantasies and deliberately seduces him, and he hangs himself, like a noble but innocent Arthurian knight ruined by forbidden love. After the wake, the dance-mad family waltz and reel around the living room with drunken abandon. The girl, either innocently or wilfully refusing to acknowledge her sin, is a willing participant in the bacchanal, and this memorably disturbing story ends exactly on the point before what might be her own fall from grace.

First published in Phoenix Irish Short Stories, Phoenix House, 1997. Collected in Antarctica, Faber & Faber, 1999

‘Snow’ by John Crowley

A cool, meditative story about grief and the fragility of memory. The narrator inherits a key to the facility that stores thousands of hours of footage recorded by an assiduous drone, documenting the life of his late, estranged wife. “I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had lost, hadn’t known what was precious to me,” he says, after viewing a brief scene of the two of them in a hotel room in Ibiza. It unlocks his previously unacknowledged grief and makes him hungry for more, but he soon discovers that there are disappointing lacunae in the drone’s coverage, and serious flaws in the facility’s technology. Although access is supposedly random, most scenes are set in winter, a season the narrator’s wife tried to avoid, and every playback increases the slow, inexorable degradation of the quality of all the stored recordings, manifested as the kind of snow that blights reception in old cathode-ray TVs. Finally, the narrator abandons his search (“I would not stay watching until there was only snow”), and makes peace with his loss and his all-too human memories. At a time when tech bros, too arrogant to recognise their ignorance, are attempting to find digital fixes for the glorious mess of human life, it seems more relevant than ever.

First published in Omni, 1985. Collected in Antiquities, Incunabula Press, 1993, it can also be read here

‘The Great Silence’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is one of the most lauded of contemporary SF writers, perhaps best known for ‘The Story of Your Life’, the novella on which the film Arrival was based; his short stories and novellas, collected in two slim volumes, are rigorous and lucid thought experiments, leavened with a profound humanity. This one, written to provide the textual element for a video installation by the visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, explores the theory which provides various explanations for Fermi’s paradox: the question of why, given the age and of the Universe and its uncountable number of stars and potentially habitable planets, we have not yet detected any trace of intelligent alien life. In brief, meditative paragraphs it outlines a contact call from a member of a species of parrot native to Puerto Rica (where the Arecibo radio telescope was located until its collapse), pointing out, with poignant humour, that while searching the sky for like-minded intelligence, humans have overlooked the intelligence of parrots, which “are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be,” and are now threatened with extinction and their own Great Silence. Like all of the best SF, it delivers a fresh perspective on humanity, from our blundering carelessness that stamps out other species to the vaulting ambition that drives the construction of radio telescopes. In its psittancine mirror we see ourselves slant.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 2016. Collected in Exhalation, Knopf, 2019. It can also be read here

‘Nirvana’ by Charles Bukowski, as read by Tom Waits

Accompanied by a softly wheezing organ, Waits’ reading of Bukowski’s uncharacteristically meditative poem about a young man riding on a bus, “cut loose from purpose”, is suitably tender and gruffly sympathetic. When the bus stops at a roadside café the young man experiences a revelatory moment of perfect happiness, feeling that “everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful.” But despite his vow to stay in that clean, well-lighted place, he follows the other passengers into the bus when it’s time to reboard, and continues on his way. The world we have is too often the world we have failed to escape.

The poem was first published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Black Sparrow Press 1992; the audio version is collected on Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, ANTI Records 2006, and can be heard here

‘The Specialist’s Hat’ by Kelly Link

Some ghost stories, especially in the Gothic mode, are remorseless re-enactments of historical violence. Link’s tale turns this convention upside-down and creates playful layers of uncertainty and doubt. A summary would give too much away. Let’s just say that there’s a scholar who lives in what might be a haunted house, but the narrative focuses on his twin daughters rather than his research, and involves their Dead game (a “let’s pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now” which allows them to do whatever they want to), a mysterious babysitter who takes care of them while their father meets a woman in the woods, a dead poet and his daughter, and the Specialist’s hat, which hangs in the attic. Like a close-up magician dealing her cards, Link sets out everything in deceptively simple sentences whose contradictions, elisions and ambiguities are puzzles and trapdoors in a game she plays with the reader. Whether or not the twins are really dead, the identity of the babysitter and the nature and provenance of the Specialist and his hat, if the father’s rendezvous is the rehearsal of a past tragedy – all remains teasingly ambiguous to the very end.

First published online in Event Horizon, 1998. Collected in Pretty Monsters, Viking, 2008, it can also be read here

‘The Second Inquisition’ by Joanna Russ

The final story in a sequence of stories and a short novel about the adventures of Alyx, a fierce female mercenary from Ancient Greece who ends up in the future (hers and ours) as a Trans-Temporal Agent. In the drowsy claustrophobia of suburban Chicago in 1925, the narrator, a girl of sixteen and an only child, is caught up in a futuristic conflict after the strange woman staying with her family confides that she’s a time traveller, a rebel (who might be Alyx’s granddaughter) hiding from her enemies in what she calls a dead area. It’s the stuff of pulp SF, featuring enigmatic technology and sudden violence, that’s invigorated by Russ’s spikily sharp prose and critique of what we’ve come to call the patriarchy. And there are hints that, like the future selves Paul encounters when he runs away from home, the visitor and the agents who finally drag her back to the future might be figures in an escapist fantasy. A deftly sustained confusion between the true and the real. “It was almost a pity that she wasn’t there,” the girl muses, after a conversation that acknowledges her importance in the visitor’s plans, and in the end she realises that she has to find her own way of escaping the conventions of her parents and the mundane world: “No more stories.”

First published in Orbit 6, Putnam, 1970. Collected in Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories, Library of America, 2023