DisLocations edited by Ian Whates
Nine Tales of Speculation and Imagination in a Limited Edition
Short stories by major British and American authors, including Ken MacLeod, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Hal Duncan and Adam Roberts
In 2006 Ian Whates edited Time Pieces, an original anthology of stories designed to raise funds for the Northampton SF Society. It won the Best Cover Art Award from the British Science Fiction Association, and one of the stories in it, Sarah Singleton's The Disappeared, was short-listed by the British Fantasy Society. For a debut anthology from a completely unknown publisher, this was an auspicious beginning.
Now Whates has produced for the same society, a second, much more ambitious anthology.
DisLocations is sub-titled nine tales of speculation and imagination, and is produced in a limited edition of 500 copies, each signed by the authors. The short stories are by major British and American authors, including Ken MacLeod, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Hal Duncan and Adam Roberts amongst others, and include one newcomer, Andy West.
The longer stories work better than the very short ones, and include two of the very best stories by British authors this year. From a purist's perspective, two of the stories, Hal Duncan's The Drifter's Tale, and Remorse by Adam Roberts are short-shorts that feature narrators talking directly to the reader (or the camera to use a film analogy). Duncan's is the better of the two and as such, two stories is one too many stories for such a small anthology.
Whates is astute enough to open and close with two strong stories at each end. In the middle are Brian Stableford's The Immortals of Atlantis, which reads -- like too many of Stableford's stories -- as if too many disparate ideas have been rammed together without the seams being smoothed over. Andrew Hook's The Glass Football, is an interesting concept given too brief a treatment, and The Convention by Amanda Hemingway is a barrage of in-jokes that raise a smile but not an out-loud laugh.
Bracketing these are the more memorable stories. Pat Cadigan's Among Strangers is a sort of continuation of an old science-fiction tradition made famous by Star Wars -- the spaceport bar. Only in Cadigan's case, she has adapted it to a rescue shelter for alien abductees on a distant space station. It's a clever subversion, atypical of Cadigan's earlier work, and promises to be the first of several such stories, which is to be welcomed.
Impasse by Andy West could have been one of the outstanding stories in the collection, filled as it is with great concepts and invention, but Whates is not a ruthless enough editor, and the reader has wade through an extended introductory backfill in the form of a two-page infodump, before the story gets going.
Chaz Brenchley's 'Terminal is a rich, dense, highly textured story about the teleportation of consciousness and the nature of identity, set on an exotic planet, and which lingers long in the memory, and like the MacLeod story, is one of the best of the year, let alone in the book.
While Lighting Out, the Ken MacLeod story that ends the collection has none of the obvious glamour of the Brenchley story, it's setting is equally exotic, and like the Brenchley, deals with the nature of consciousness. It has enough invention for a full length novel, and should if there is any justice, be picked up by at least one of the Year's Best anthologies.
DisLocations is unlikely to find wider exposure, which is a shame. Several of the stories deserve wider readership, which hopefully they will find, and Whates is to be commended for producing such a handsome work.
