Celebration, edited by Ian Whates

Ian Whates is rapidly becoming one of the major British anthologists, having made his debut barely two years ago, and this year he has two new collections of original stories coming out. One of them, Celebration is published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association. Seventeen stories by many of the leading lights of British SF are clustered by theme, setting, or subject.

A brace of alternate histories open, starting with Stephen Baxter’s “The Jubilee Plot,” which is set in an Alternate England where an early rail disaster saw the industry die stillborn. As a result, a much more repressive England celebrates Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Baxter seems to be able to create uchronias at will, but his characterization is always his weakness, and this story really failed to engage me at all.

Ken MacLeod’s “Wilson at Woking” is, with its marching machines that no one dares call Martians, almost anti-history, dedicated to what the author describes as:

“that small happy percentage of my compatriots who (according to a recent survey) believe that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was Harold Wilson; that…the War of the Worlds, Xena and Richard Sharpe were real … and that the Battle of the Bulge…Adolf Hitler and the Cold War were not.”

“The Killing Fields” by Kim Lakin-Smith does exactly what its title implies. A whirling dervish of a story set in Shropshire Hills, “reduced to a rabid war zone by gang violence, mafia-owned cartels and vigilantism,” Regan and her sidekick, an eleven-year-old girl eke out a marginal existence in the aftermath of a near-future civil war. It’s fast, brutal, and as nihilistic as anything written since Michael Moorcock introduced Jerry Cornelius (who crops up as Jerzy Kornel in the previous story).

By contrast, Ian Watson’s “Having the Time of His Life” is much more sedate, the story of time distortion practiced by a couple who pretend to be viewing houses so that they can make love in a stranger’s house. Watson’s imagination is as fecund as ever, and his examination of the “fast-time bubble” is scrupulously logical in this examination of an immortal succubus from another universe, when mythology was reality.

From one skill learned—the ability to distort time—to another, “The Dog Hypnotist” by Tricia Sullivan has a beautiful ambivalence in its title. In contrast to Watson’s lush, almost overblown prose, Sullivan’s sly story about training dogs is almost underwritten but no less effective. Any dog owner knows that as much as they train their dog, their pet conversely also bends them to its will.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s “Crack Angel” features a knife-scarred Russian, mysterious blondes, and a crab-eating macaque monkey in a noir-esque story of betrayal, murder, and time travelling clones that is almost outstanding; instead, because Grimwood seems unable or unwilling to subordinate style to story, rather than vice versa, it is merely good

“Keep Smiling with Great Minutes” by M. John Harrison evades meaning with each reading. Something called Volsie leaks out of the narrator’s leg on a trip to Paris, and while he pushes most of it back in, some of it escapes and starts talking to him. Later, the narrator realizes that someone talking to him in a graveyard is made from the same substance. The nearest we are given to an explanation is that Volsie is the psychic residue of one’s dreams.

Molly Brown’s “Living with the Dead” has a similar dreamlike quality at its beginning, but little by little metamorphoses into a straightforward, if quiet, tale of zombies. There’s nothing particularly novel or original in its short length, but the very gentleness of the story makes it work better than most such stories of its type.

In Brian Stableford’s “Next to Godliness,” neural patches encourage “socially acceptable behaviour,” and patch-wearers have split into two categories: Pride and Joy—but the Pride patches create an obsessive-compulsive striving for perfection that can create catastrophic breakdown. Didactic at times, sometimes overworking the Biblical metaphors (the protagonists are Adam, Nick, Eve, Lilith, and Judith), Stabelford’s wry prose is nonetheless thought-provoking, and this is still, for all its faults, one of the best stories in the book.

“Mellowing Grey” by Dave Hutchinson tries to fuse fantasy with SF with less than complete success. A computer virus has ended civilization as it stands today, and in a post-apocalyptic landscape reminiscent of Keith Roberts’s The Chalk Giants, sans-mythic undertones, a few humans hold out and even dream of a futile uprising. The story’s problems stem from the uneasy meld of fantasy and SF (the virus may have been caused by the elves), and the ambiguity of the ending.

Liz Williams’s “At Shadow Cope” is another fantasy, set in a seventeenth-century England ruled by Magi. It has Williams’s trademark flamboyant visuals (”The demon spluttered as I read the incantations. The words fell from my mouth and caught fire, smouldering into coals before they hit the marble surface of the table.”) and is over far too quickly, leaving the impression that there is scope for further visits to houses such as Shadow Cope.

“Peculiar Bone, Unimaginable Key” by Brian Aldiss shows that Aldiss is still as willing as ever to take risks. In a future Britain under Islamic law, workers in a herring smoking shed discover a bone fragment and a key that grants visions; one such revelation confirms that Jesus visited Whitby in the eighteenth century, from where the narrative heads off via an unexpected love affair to transcendence. It demands several readings, since the story’s changes of direction can seem arbitrary on first acquaintance.

Martin Sketchley’s “Deciduous Trees” is a closely observed slice-of-life full of details beautifully observed. Mick, Steven’s father-in-law, is dying. He isn’t afraid, for he has his religion to comfort him, unlike his (at best) agnostic son-in-law. Steven’s fear is for the devastation Mick’s death will wreak on his beloved Amy—Mick’s daughter—and so, even though he is an agnostic, he makes a deal with Jesus. Numinous and moving, it’s a fine story by a writer who on this evidence deserves wider exposure.

Sadly, “Soirée” by Alastair Reynolds is too similarly structured to anyone who’s read his “Beyond the Aquila Rift” not to telegraph its plot change. The first starship to leave Earth arrives at its destination to find the world colonized by those who’ve left later, and the new arrivals are greeted by a welcoming soirée. Except that things are not as they seem…

Celebration ends with three stories set on islands of varying quality:

Ian R. MacLeod’s “On the Sighting of Other Islands” is a fragmentary piece about vast city-islands floating on an infinite sea, but other than densely-packed images, it’s too short to boast a plot and feels like an opportunity wasted.

Christopher Priest’s “Firefly” returns the reader to the Dream Archipelago, the temporally distorted world which Priest has been taking readers to for three decades. Like most of his short stories, it’s more about mood and setting than about plot, but it’s still a delight to read and is an excellent sampler for those readers encountering Priest for the first time.

“The Man of the Strong Arm” by Adam Roberts ends the collection with an extended in-joke; on yet another island, this time Arcadian, scholars pore over data chips brought to them by island scavengers containing lost texts, such as the story of the first moon landing. To these future scholars, Edgar Rice Burroughs (”Edgar Burroughs of the Rice”) is as reliable as the story of the first moon landing, and “Sir Arno of Bergerac” is quoted alongside “Robert High-line.” The last line is a delight.

Celebration is too short a book to support seventeen stories, some of which are little more than fragments. If Celebration has a weakness, it’s in the number of stories that misfire. About a third are good, a third readable, but the rest seem to be there to make up the numbers, and exchanging a couple of these for some longer works would have strengthened Celebration, even if it had meant delaying its launch.

Publisher: Newcon Press (March 2008)
Pages: 240
Price: $39.49
Limited edition hardback ISBN: 0955579139
Paperback ISBN: 0955579147