253
Geoff Ryman
366 pages, including index and questionaire
published in 1996

This is, without question, a brilliant book. It was first recommended to me some five years back, but I never saw a copy until recently. Before I got my hands on this book, the most I'd read of Geoff Ryman where some short science fiction stories here and there. 253 isn't a science fiction novel though; it's the story of a specific tube journey, on January 11th 1995, which lasted seven and a half minutes, from Embankment to Elephant and Castle; the journey of 253 lifetimes, as the cover has it. Why this journey was chosen you'll learn during the story and in the afterword.

A train on the London Underground has exactly seven cars. Each tube carriage has exactly 36 seats. In a perfectly filled tube train then, where every seat is taken, there are 252 passengers. With the driver of the train, this makes for 253 people. In 253, each of these 253 people gets their own story, exactly 253 words long, though sometimes with helpful and informative footnotes attached. Each story is in the form of a fact sheet, with sections titled "outward appearance", "inside information" (who or what the person is) and "what (s)he is doing or thinking". 253 actually started life as an interactive novel published on the internet, which may help explain its structure.

The result is oddly compelling. It's the ultimate voyeurism, a seven and a half minute look into the minds of the people next to you on the Tube. It's addictive and led me to read it faster and faster. Ironically enough, I mostly read this while on the Amsterdam metro... I'm hard pressed to call this even fiction, let alone a novel, as the people may be mostly invented, but the results are so very real. It may sounds like some sort of pomo technical exercise, but it's far from soulless. The formal games here are very much in service to the story as much as the story itself is determined by its structure. This could not have been a "normal" novel.

You need to read this book, it's as simple as that.