Survival – when a systems failure leaves a spacecraft drifting in space, the passengers and crew must find a way to eke out their food supplies till help arrives. There’s only one woman aboard and she is desperate to find a way to ensure her unborn child survives. Gruesome, horrific and yet kinda fun too… I enjoyed Wyndham's Day of the Triffids immensely, finding his wry sense of humor quite fitting (and refreshing!) with his mid-20th century tales to astonish. These shorter tales exude more of the same dry wit and an excellent foreword by the author lays out his reasoning for his quirky approach to science fiction. Survival” is a brutal story that I was not expecting. Precision machined deconstruction of humanity. “Dumb Martian” is also a brutal little piece of revenge, and much like “Survival” gives us another woman who will not be cowed. “Wild Flower” is poetic and melancholy. There are serious, satirical, and outright comic examples of travelling to another place or time, sometimes with the intention of settling there. Wyndham is clearly against the historical human pattern of dominating and enslaving or obliterating those already there and was perhaps a multiculturalist before the word was coined:

Wyndham's writing here reminded me most of H.G. Wells's social comentary science fiction, espcially that of The Time Machine. Here a man gets a brief chance to live in the future when he is mistakenly transmitted into a distant future. Although the future society is no Eutopia it is better than his life in the past. How hard will he fight to keep his future life and do they really want him in the future? A time-travel rom-com which, despite the foreword, has a spot of adventure and peril. The title refers to the sort of anomaly that can arise if users of history-machines do anything more than observe. The risks of killing one’s grandfather or becoming one’s own progenitrix are mentioned. This is The Butterfly Effect, an idea generally credited to Bradbuy’s Sound of Thunder from 1952 (see my review HERE), the year before this story was first published.Terry lost his legs in an explosion and then something of his mind from constant use of strong painkillers. One day he wakes to find himself, with legs, in a futuristic place that is not as utopian as it first seems. Near-immortality has a price, and two people attempt to outwit each other to survive at all.

A twee story, unlike the others. Felicity Fray is a teacher who loves nature in a way that reminds me of Wodehouse’s Madeleine Bassett who thinks “the stars are God's daisy-chain”, but without the charm or clever plots. If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.” I had acquired an understanding of the language… but the concepts that were behind it did not necessarily follow.” This seems like a cliché, but it predates most of the sci-fi it brings to mind. It contrasts some very misogynistic characters with a woman who is unafraid to make and defend her choices. As it’s a survival story, she’s not the only one with difficult decisions about priorities. The punchline is humorous horror. Meteor – a threatened species sends explorers out into space to find a new home, and the planet they find is Earth. Comedy and tragedy all rolled into one – a beautifully imaginative story, this one.Pillar to Post: Other fave - a physically disabled war veteran has his consciousness transferred via body swap to a future society as part of an experiment by said future scientist, then decides he doesn't want to leave. Funny and sad in equal measure.

When I was in my teens and twenties I read quite a lot of science fiction, both short stories and full-length novels. Now I hardly read any. On the rare occasions that I browse the science-fiction shelves of book shops I usually don't come away with anything. On the even rarer occasions when I have bought recently-published science-fiction, I've usually been bored, and abandoned the book. The Seeds of Time is an expanded version of Fredric Jameson’s 1991 Wellek Library Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine. In it, he takes current discussions of postmodernity to the cutting edge. Moving on from his definitive study Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson in this next book surveys the limits in our current thinking about what Utopia, totality, innovation, feasible socialism, Second-World culture, architectural incommensurability, and Critical Regionalism might mean in the 1990s and beyond. Fawleys peepholes - tourists from the future make people feel like they are living in a goldfish bowl. What can you do when you cannot touch physically? loved how they turned the tables in the end. Pillar to Post": a future scientists' experiment results in a legless man from the present to be teleported in to a healthy body far in to the future. Understandably, the man from our time does not want to return. A charming pastoral tale where Bert travels the Martian canals on an improvised boat, living a tinker's life, befriending some of the “utterly unmechanical” Martian families he regularly visits, and noting the scenery and plants.Wyndham often (not just here) relies rather heavily on a character writing a report, diary, or letters as a handy way to explain things.