‘Prolific’
is not a word to describe Christopher Priest. Taking his time with
each creation, some stories or novels appear one after another, while
at other periods, there can be gaps of years or even a decade between
published works. An artist, the muse must, apparently, be at work.
Bringing together five stories from the late 70s, An
Infinite Summer (1979), the muse
was, apparently, at work.
The five
stories can essentially be split into two parts. Both examinations
of the same idea (love through the lens of time), the first part are
the title story and “Palely Loitering”. One capturing the idea
with far more maturity and gravitas than the other, “Palely
Loitering”, as the title indirectly suggests, is the mediocre of
the two. About a boy who goes to a time-flux park with his family,
he accidentally launches himself into the future where he meets
himself, and is introduced to a young lady and told not to forget her
before being sent back to his family. Nominated for a Hugo
(undoubtedly due to the simplicity of the time hopping idea), the
story has a lot of trouble bearing the weight of its theme given the
lightness with which the emotions at stake are presented and the
distraction of the time travel mechanic. “The Infinite Summer”,
however, handles the idea with far more aplomb. Invoking in the
reader the desired weight of theme it intended, it tells of a man
travels ahead in time to witness the bombing of London by Germany in
WWII. Emphasis shifted from the time travel mechanic toward the
tableauxs the man is witness to, not to mention the role his personal
life plays in his understanding of them, Priest is able to capture
that unidentifiable something that tugs at the heart strings without
being cheap.
The other
part of the content in An
Infinite Summer
is material that would later be re-collected in Dream
Archipelago: “Whores”,
“Whores”, and “The Watched”. A
horror take on a Hemingway-style story, “Whores” tells of a man
convalescing in a village destroyed by war. Looking for a woman he
formerly knew who had to resort to selling her body to survive, he
moves among the brothels to find her. What he finds tears at him,
literally and figuratively. In what is likely the most transcendent
story in the collection, “The Negation” tells of a young
conscript sent to guard a distant, mountainous border against the
enemy. The freezing, snowy village where he barracks is not entirely
disconnected, however. The ruling power, in an effort to offset its
oppression with effusiveness, has commissioned a well-known writer to
travel to the village and write a patriotic story. Said author having
penned the young man’s favorite novel, The
Affirmation,
he is ecstatic to meet her before she arrives but nervous when
actually standing face to face. The two having a good conversation,
but the realities of war, nevertheless, interfere. In one of the rare
moments Priest plays with intertextuality, The
Affirmation is,
of course, the next novel Priest himself would publish, resulting in
an a fictional situation being bolstered by its metafictional
reality.
Closing
the collection in intriguing fashion is “The Watched.” About the
inventor of a tiny-tiny camera he calls a ‘scyntylla’, things go
smoothly until production of the small cameras becomes ubiquitous,
meaning they are everywhere and into everything. People hiding them
to spy on others, the man chooses to quit his life and move to a
remote island and there do something more interesting: study the
local natives. Observing them from afar, he takes notes, all the
while vacuuming his home each day to remove the scyntyllas that build
up. A strange occurrence happening one day, it leads to the question:
who is watching who? An oddly prescient story given the growing
presence security cameras and monitoring have in the Western world,
it’s fair to say Priest touches upon the aspect of humanity that
dreads constant observation in literary, abstract manner.
In the
end, An Infinite Summer
is a subtly superb collection of short stories, save “Palely
Loitering”. Each story thought through and presented in a light
that shines on underlying human concerns, Priest proves fiction is an
art, even at short length. The only real drawback to the collection
is that if you have already read 1999’s Dream
Archipelago, then the only new
material you are getting here is the title story (a story which,
ironically, is considered part of the Dream Archipelago but for
whatever reason did not find its way into that collection) and
“Palely Loitering”. Beyond that, this is among the best of the
70s in terms of short speculative fiction; “An Infinite Summer”,
“The Negation”, and “The Watched” truly stand-out.
The
following are the five stories collected in An
Infinite Summer:
An
Infinite Summer
Whores
Palely
Loitering
The
Negation
The
Watched
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