Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974
After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.
The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.