The Very Slow Time Machine
by Ian Watson
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The Very Slow Time Machine arrives on earth in 1985. Its sole inhabitant is old and mad. Soon it becomes apparent that for him, time is going slowly backward. With every day, he is getting younger and saner. The world, and its whole concept of time, science and philosophy, must wait for him to speak. But while the world waits, it changes...Tags
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A collection of science fiction stories from the 1970s. It's hard to know quite what to make of these. Most of them are a bizarre combination of really clever and imaginative SF ideas, oddball mysticism, and flat-out nonsense, written in a style that I'm not at all sure how to describe. I want to use words like "oblique" and "dreamy," but I don't know that that really captures it at all. In their own way, all of the stories are interesting, but very few of them are anything remotely approaching satisfying, and by the time I got to the end I was feeling a little frustrated with the whole thing. It's possible that keeping the reader feeling unsettled and uncertain is partly the point, but if so, well, I've seen it done to much better show more effect. And yet, several of these stories seem to really almost have... something. I'm just not remotely sure what. show less
A collection of short stories. At worst, they lean towards well-executed gimmicks or dance around exploitation; at best they are brilliant twists on conventional science fiction. What if a time machine appeared in your lab, and sat there for decades with a trapped occupant?
A reverse gear is a wonderful idea for a time machine, and this story explains why. Of course the traveler could have been an imprisoned criminal......
Indeholder "The Very Slow Time Machine", "Thy Blood Like Milk", "Sitting on a Starwood Stool", "Agoraphobia, A. D. 2000", " Programmed Love Story", "The Girl Who Was Art", "Our Loves So Truly Meridional", "Immune Dreams", "My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl", "The Roentgen Refuges", "A Time-Span to Conjure With", "On Cooking the First Hero in Spring", "The Event Horizon".
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Jan 31, 2015Danish
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221+ Works 5,580 Members
British science fiction author Ian Watson was born in 1943. He received a first class Honors degree in English Literature in 1963 and a research degree in English and French 19th Century literature in 1965 from Balliol College, Oxford. After lecturing in literature and Futures Studies, he became a full-time author in 1976. His first novel, The show more Embedding, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the French Prix Apollo. His novel The Jonah Kit won the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Orbit Award. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence from 1990 to 1991. His poem True Love won the 2002 Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Original publication date
- 1979 (Collection) (Collection); 1977 (Agoraphobia, A.D.2000) (Agoraphobia, A.D.2000); 1976 (The Event Horizon) (The Event Horizon); 1976 (the Girl who was Art) (the Girl who was Art); 1978 (Immune Dreams) (Immune Dreams); 1978 (My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl) (My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl) (show all 14); 1975 (On Cooking the First Hero of Spring) (On Cooking the First Hero of Spring); 1974 (Our Loves so Truly Meridional) (Our Loves so Truly Meridional); 1974 (Programmed Love Story) (Programmed Love Story); 1978 (The Roentgen Refugees) (The Roentgen Refugees); 1974 (Sitting on a Starwood stool) (Sitting on a Starwood stool); 1973 (Thy Blood Like Milk) (Thy Blood Like Milk); 1978 (A Time-Span to Conjure With) (A Time-Span to Conjure With); 1978 (The Very Slow Time Machine) (The Very Slow Time Machine)
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- Reviews
- 5
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- Languages
- English, French, Italian
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- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
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