From Publishers Weekly
Although not all Jones's visions are unexpected (Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce are not exactly unfamiliar to genre readers), other writers in this collection of 20 stories are more surprising, like Dostoevsky, Melville, Muriel Spark and Hilaire Belloc. Here we find "I Am Waiting," a story of a man's brief trips into the future, by Christopher Isherwood; John Updike's amusing "The Chaste Planet," in which sexless aliens nevertheless discover the frustration of impotence; and Guillaume Apollinaire's odd tale of a phantasmagorical encounter in an Alpine cavern, "The Moon King." More than a few of these stories are thinly-veiled social commentaries; in best Swiftian tradition, Poe's "Mellonta Tauta," Stephen Leacock's "The Man in Asbestos," Dostoevsky's "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" and several others use trips to other worlds or the future to excoriate contemporary life. Several others look with horror on the invention of robots, including Melville's "The Bell-Tower," "Robert" by Evan Hunter ("Ed McBain") and "Moxon's Master" by Bierce. Most of the pieces are far cruder and more clumsily done even than the genre fiction of their day, and far less accomplished than the genre's better work today. Jones might have done better to include stories by Graham Greene, John Cheever, Jorge Luis Borges or Anthony Burgess, all of whom have written more successful science fiction pieces. All in all, this volume makes a good argument for writers sticking to what they know best.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Christopher Isherwood, George Bernard Shaw, Muriel Spark, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stephen Leacock, Fran{‡}cois Rabelais, and John Updike are the most unexpected contributors to this originally British collection that asks the old question, "Did you know that ______ wrote science fiction?" To which the answer in these cases is decidedly "No, we didn't," although the man who wrote
Back to Methuselah (Shaw) has always been a likely suspect; so, too, archparodist Leacock. Some of the 13 other contributors, however, are pretty well known for their sf or proto-sf. Poe, for instance, figures proudly in most histories of the genre, as does Voltaire for the very story, "Microm{‚}egas," reprinted here. And E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" is an sf anthology staple. Which is not to say it isn't a pleasure to read herein, as are all these tales by mainstream writers supposedly slumming in a genre (or in Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain's case, drifting from one genre to another).
Ray Olson
