Very Slow Time Machine

by Ian Watson

1st edition Granada 1981 paperback, vg+ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Time Travel, Fiction, Anthologies, Short Story Collection, Speculative Fiction

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though it's clear that Ian Watson is writing from a different universe, he still makes it nearly impossible to rate this collection with traditional stars. Brilliant, agitating, violent, masturbatory in both prose and delivery, and brimming over the cosmic rim with megatons of SF hedonism.

The Very Slow Time Machine • (1978)
-Time in reverse in this spatial oddity that tweaks notions of both time machines and martyrdom. Nearly thought this was a David Masson short with all its New World's idiosyncrasies. Solid but not as worthy of what's to come.

Thy Blood Like Milk • (1973)
-a road novelette that burns with a more ecological delirium associated outright with Horror. It's got Aztec Gods, highway blood rituals, and an intriguing premise where hunting down those vagrant rays of sunshine in the desert may bring enlightenment, or something far, far worse.

Sitting on a Starwood Stool • (1974)
-this was madness of the funhouse kind. Starwood is a rare wood from a planet Toscanini. Not only does the magical wood show beautiful undulations of time-grown orbits around a nuclear sun, it is also a powerful healing element, and this Starwood can only be found on a simple stool in the lair of the powerful Grand Monk of the Yakuza. Toss in some Vegas pyrotechnics and a steel lazer-eyed guard dog, you have a brilliant exercise in colorful disregard - a Technicolor canvas in the same vein as Delany's 'Nova'.

Agoraphobia, A.D. 2000 • (1977)
Another stunner showcases our forlorn hero, Yamaguchi, who was once a cherished astronaut but is now relegated to a one-way experiment where he must walk a 'sealed' park outside Tokyo. The long walk is not only to test his pulses under agoraphobic angst...oh, but also...he must commit suicide as well. A real twist on the Samurai code, and one of the more unique harakiri farewells ever put to the page. Near brilliant.

Programmed Love Story • (1974)
-there is more implicit brilliance here than most daring SF spanning the New Wave midlists, however this disjointed tale of two lovers with multiple personas and professional guises devolves into a blur of discombobulation and nauseating color. Prostitutes with 101 faces, lands lost in A.I. Nothing is real, nor will it ever be.

The Girl Who Was Art • (1976)
-just like 'Programmed Love Story' actually - instead of the sex industry, Ian tosses in the art industry and its inherent disdain for longevity & tradition. Women models are confined to the trends as they become the 1-dimensional muse, but only momentarily as the trend unravels into The Grid, a movement that revolutionizes the art scene yet again with total reality - aka videos of real life transmissions randomly displayed in different parts of the world. Strange and unfulfilling because you can never grasp what Watson is trying to achieve. Perhaps Ian has too many toys to play with in this one, no doubt.

Our Loves So Truly Meridional • (1975)
-two Japanese lovers are separated by an invisible fourth-dimension wall. Precious in an incongruous way, a tale whose language keeps it alive, but in the end, it's simply a perfumed fog where nothing ever quite takes shape within.

Immune Dreams • (1978)
-a scientist dreams of cancer as the harmful trigger to fourth-body evolution only to end up cerebrally wired to feral cats. Perhaps the weakest entry.

My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl • (1978)
-like a piece of Russian absurdism, this short piece shows the illuminating terror felt by a man who vomits out his soul, and keeps this tadpole effigy in a fishbowl to remind himself what he has lost. An awkward dinner with friends highlights the tale with a scene that director Todd Solondz ('Happiness') would surely have had his fun with. Domestic Entropy.

The Roentgen Refugees • (1977)
-fine tale of the last scientists traveling a barren and bone-riddled harshland (Africa?), encountering members of The Church of Abandonment as they pilgrimage towards the finite realization that the Universe holds a God no longer. Exploring racial genocide and eventual extinction, Watson regains his momentum to the fullest.

A Time-Span to Conjure With • (1978)
-properly f**ked-up examination of a new race of humans....yes, our colonized humans have terraformed a new planet to become deviant Tinkerbells who fly through the grid network of time and visibility. High-tier weird fiction.

On Cooking the First Hero in Spring • (1975)
-another trek into horror territory, Watson has us encounter a race of black slug creatures who ceremoniously bind and burn their sacrificial peers to become something between harbinger-of-doom and city-park sculpture. Brilliantly pulpy with the diseased patina of golden-aged grue.

The Event Horizon • (1976)
-not the big bang to close out this stellar and wholly unique collection. Black Hole shows a sign of a sentient being living inside. On the star cruiser, Subrahmanyan Chadrasekhar, a psi engineer may be the culprit, baiting and hooking his shipmates into believing that the Starmaker is recruiting them into a new stage of blissful evolution. Cordwainer Smith definitely provided inspiration.

A diverse and important collection for those ready to slip further into demented territories of SF. Despite him relishing in messes of ideas, Watson is an underrated master, the Jackson Pollock of the New Wave. ****

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is full of the sort of mind-bending ideas and narrative experiments that I like best in my science fiction - Watson is very much writing in a British SF tradition, that of Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard I'd say, but his vision is his own. Much as I loved the caliber of Watson's conceits (a mind-meld with an entity within a black hole whose idea of reality is an inversion of our own, a visit to an Earth where impermeable barriers divide various regions along meridional lines, a sojourn among aliens who extend further in time than we do - and what exactly that could mean - and more) and his formal freedom (several of these stories do not deliver conventional narratives but almost fragmentary vignettes), I disliked aspects of his treatment of gender and race. Most female characters are sexualised and people are often characterised a little too strongly according to race or ethnicity.

[Roddy Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘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…’

Blurb from the 1981 Granada paperback edition

There aren’t many authors who master the art of short story writing, but Watson is definitely in there with the greats. I remember reading a couple of these stories in their original publications and it is to Watson’s credit that the memory of the essence of the tales still remains. Watson is also one of the most inventive and creative writers around and a more diverse collection of ideas and subject matter from one author will be a tough order.
He is also particularly prolific, and has several collections of short stories available. They are all highly recommended.
Ian Watson exhibits a prolificacy and breadth and depth in theme, subject and setting in his short stories, something unusual in SF writers since their short forms on the whole tend to fall within certain parameters.
Furthermore, each story is exquisitely constructed, its brevity belying the wealth of concepts employed.
The title piece for instance examines not only issues of causality and paradox, but also looks at religion’s relationship with the media.
The stories here are a selection from the Nineteen Seventies, covering a period of about five years.

The Very Slow Time Machine (Anticipations – Christopher Priest (Ed) 1978)
Thy Blood Like Milk (New Worlds Quarterly 1973)
Sitting on a Starwood Stool (Science Fiction Monthly 1974)
Agoraphobia AD 2000 (Andromeda 2 – Peter Weston (Ed) 1977)
Programmed Love Story (Transatlantic Review 1974)
The Girl Who Was Art (Ambit 1976)
Our Loves So Truly Meridional (Science Fiction Monthly 1974)
Immune Dreams (Pulsar 1 – George Hay (Ed) 1978)
My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl (Magazine of F&SF 1978)
The Roentgen Refugees (New Writings in SF #30 – Bulmer (Ed) 1978)
A Time Span to Conjure With (Andromeda 3 – Peter Weston (Ed) 1978)
On Cooking The First Hero in Spring (Science Fiction Monthly 1975)
Event Horizon (Faster Than Light; an original anthology about interstellar travel – Jack Dann and George Zebrowski (Eds) 1976)



The Very Slow Time Machine

A beautifully crafted piece where the themes are paradox and causality. A capsule appears from nowhere in 1985 containing a mad and incoherent old man whose life appears to be running backwards. The capsule appears to have been sent back in time from the near future and is impregnable, but the highly efficient recycling system inside the allows its occupant to sustain himself. As he grows younger and saner he begins to deliver a message.
Over the years the time-traveller begins to assume a Messianic status with the general public.
Ironically it would appear that the media storm around the capsule and its passenger has ensured that we build such a ship and send it back in time and has also ensured that that the occupant – who has grown up somewhere outside the capsule knowing of his destiny – will be compelled to come to the launch site, believing that he is destined to be God.

Thy Blood Like Milk

An ecological tale in which gangs roam the highways searching for sunspots; moments when the sun breaks through a permanent cloud layer caused by pollution and global warming. One of the leaders of the gang, who has revived the Aztec cult of the sun god, is being punished for a death he caused on the road . Having his blood milked for hospital use is paying his penance. The story however focuses on his relationship with his nurse who happens to be the girlfriend of the man he killed.

Sitting on a Starwood Stool

Watson is adept in packing several extraordinary concepts into a deceptively short story. Every 1.23 years aliens appear at a certain point in space to trade a few small cuts of the rare Starwood for valuable products from Earth; a Botticelli or even a group of humans.
Starwood is the product of trees grown on an asteroid with an eccentric orbit about its sun, and absorbs the energies of trees. When turned into something such as a stool, it will leak its stored star energy into whomever it comes into contact with, rejuvenating or curing the subject.
A cancer victim hatches a plot to steal the stool form a Yakuza boss, but things do not go according to plan.

Agoraphobia AD 2000

Watson again demonstrates his fascination with Japanese culture in this surreal tale in which an astronaut is required to enter a virtual environment in order to commit hari kiri.

Programmed Love Story

A highly stylised Japanese tale of a businessman who is requested to abandon his bride as she is rather too complaint to be a corporate wife. When she becomes a hostess at the Queen Bee they meet again, but in her work she has been endowed with the persona of an aggressive and ruthless Imperial Consort, and it is this with which he falls in love,
Beautifully written and beautifully structured.

The Girl Who Was Art

A story which examines Art and Japanese culture in which a young girl undergoes muscle training in order to reproduce three-dimensionally the work of a twentieth century photographer in tableaux forms. But Art, it appears, is fickle and transient.

Our Loves So Truly Meridional

The world becomes divided into segments along the meridians by immense glass-like forcefield walls. Two people in separate segments attempt to reach the poles to find out what happens at the nexus of the barriers. It’s in the detail where Watson excels, envisioning societies where a globe of the world has been reduced to a single bowlike segment with a steel string connecting the poles.

Immune Dreams

A man who may or may not be suffering from cancer believes that dreams are the body’s way of correcting errant DNA, He elects to become part of an experiment in which the part of the brain which suppresses volitional control during sleep is turned off.

My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl

A rather weak tale in which a man is convinced by his wife that the amoebic creature he has coughed up is his soul, and keeps it alive in a goldfish bowl

The Roentgen Refugees

Following the unexpected supernova of Sirius, the world is blasted by the resultant flux of Gamma radiation and only a fraction of the world’s population are saved, mainly in the Western World. Set in South Africa (and written during the time of apartheid) it’s a philosophical piece about third world issues, faith and racism on various levels. Like most of Watson’s short fiction it is brief, yet complex.

A Time Span to Conjure With

A scheduled inspection of a young colony world finds the colonists childless and oddly philosophical. It appears that an indigenous species (spoken of as ‘fairies’ due to their apparent transparency and elusiveness) exist in Time in a different sense to ourselves.
The aliens appear to be very alien, made more so by the fact that Watson keeps them at arm’s length. We see them briefly on the page, but realise through the narrative that they are always around.

On Cooking The First Hero in Spring

Three human anthropologists examine an alien tribe who show little signs of intelligence and seemingly have only one word in their vocabulary, although a Buddhist member of the team looks at them from a different perspective.
Initially it is thought that the creatures had built an aisle of statuary, depicting themselves or their ancestors, but it transpires that every ‘dawn’ one of their number is chosen to be baked alive in a shell of clay, and then put in position among the statues forming a strange highway to nowhere.

Event Horizon

Maybe the least accessible of the stories, this features a black hole which may or may not have a mind trapped with it, and some investigators, who achieve telepathic union by the use of drugs and tantric sex. It’s very much a tale of its time and seems – unlike the other pieces – oddly dated.

[Baal Of · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title track was the best, with The Roentgen Refugees being next only because of the bleh ending. There were quite a few of the stories that had good ideas at the core, but my taste seems at odds with Watson's aesthetic and I generally disliked his endings which mostly just seemed to fizzle out or have some kind of pseudo-profound endcap. He leans towards an artsy-fartsy style, and a lot of his speculation is non-science mysticism, which tends to be my least favorite kind of SF. I'm on the fence between a 2 and 3 stars, but since I round up, and he is a competent writer I'll go with the latter. This one is going straight to the give-away pile.

[Scott Golden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above-average collection by an above-average writer. The title story is a brilliantly simple creation: What If a time machine traveled to the past in real time? i.e. For every one second that we go forward a time machine from the future moves backward one-second-at-a-time. If someone from 10 years in the future starts moving backwards, we will meet 5 years from now; it will be 5 years in the past for that time traveler, yet he will be 5 years older than when he began his journey.
Simple, eh?

[Devero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antologia di uno scrittore di cui ricordavo poco o nulla, ma decisamente interessante per le idee che porta.
Il racconto che dà il titolo all'antologia è una visione un poco diversa di una macchina del tempo, interessante ma non il migliore.
Secondo me i racconti migliori sono il distopico "Il Dio Sole", un horror SF niente male, e "Lo Sgabello di Legnon di Stella" che è molto incisivo. Discreti anche gli altri racconti, ma nulla di memorabile.
3 stelle.

[Antonio Ippolito · Rating 5 out of 5]

segnalo che mancano due racconti della raccolta originale

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual with Ian Watson, a very uneven mixture. Some of the stories are instantly forgettable, but every now and then he gets it right and produces a truly great line:

Marina, whose beating heart I held within my hand. Thy blood like milk for me has flowed, hot as iron from a furnace!

[Peter Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost every tale in this collection has a great science fiction premise but sadly more than half them peter out into pointless piffle. There are one or two real gems of stories here though, particularly ‘A Time-Span to Conjure With’.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed The Very Slow Time Machine the most. The method of time travel is ludicrous and I totally dig it.

[SciFi Pinay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn't expect for this hard scifi short story collection to be ethereal. Have to re-read with a different mindset next time -- scifi concepts are very closely intertwined with heavy philosophical themes/messages that make the storytelling more like magical realism than absurdist, aka no boring exposition as writing style is dreamlike. If Harlan Ellison and Stanislaw Lem wrote stories together. My fave stories:

The Very Slow Time Machine: an old scientist from the future becomes a messianic figure as he becomes part of the experimental testing of a time machine, enabling him to go back in time while the rest of the world go forward in time

Thy Blood Like Milk: reminds me of the very early times of the Mad Max postapocalyptic setting with ancient Aztec mythology references amid the desperate search for sunlight

Sitting on a Starwood Stool: trees found on an alien planet are said to be "organic batteries" that rejuvenate living cells aka provide healing properties, including for the human brain

Programmed Love Story: after a man breaks up with his wife because their astrologies were incompatible, the woman starts working for an escort service that uses a computer program to temporarily change her personality during work hours per clients' preferences

The Girl Who Was Art: a girl is employed to literally mimic various works of art her master desires ("...that's what true art is--the unrecoverable moment. Mistake up till now has been to try to keep the supposedly significant moment alive for ever and ever...")

My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl: ...literally

The Roentgen Refugees: Africans bitterly mull over how most survivors of an apocalyptic cosmic ray storm brought on by a nearby supernova are elites from developed countries, while the rest perished

[Rod Van Meter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up in a used bookshop due to the cool title alone, with no idea who Ian Watson is. Turns out he's a British author who did most of his work in the 1970s and 80s, whence these stories come from.
I'd say he's a bit of a throwback, the stories feel a little more like classic 1950s than this later date, at least to me.
The title story itself is a clever idea and well told -- and by coincidence, the year 2019 figures prominently. Of the others, I liked about half. A couple of them feature Japanese characters or are set in Japan itself, and are pretty accurate renditions, a pleasant surprise. Turns out Watson lived in Japan for some years, beginning in the late 1960s, as I learned from Google's preview of the The Book of Ian Watson. One of the other stories features Native Americans, and I found it such a muddle that I gave up and went on to the next story.
So, a worthy pastime, but not life-changing.
(read dates are approximate)

[Hex75 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Devo ammettere di non conoscere bene Ian Watson e di aver preso il libro affascinato dalla solita copertina surreale di karel thole e dal curioso titolo, perfettamente in linea con altri dell' "urania" dell'era fruttero & lucentini.
Però devo anche ammettere che questa "cronomacchina molto lenta" non mi ha colpito allieno: talvolta mi arriva il ricordo dei racconti di James Ballard, con il quale Watson condivide un certo tono angosciante, ma altre volte neppure quello, e i racconti scorrono veloci senza però soddisfarmi.
Non intendo dire che siano brutti (anzi "l'occhio della rana" è ottimo), ma mi han lasciato poco.
Comunque un esempio della fantascienza della seconda metà dei 70s, utile per capire meglio l'evoluzione del genere.

[Hollerache · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title choice of The Very Slow Time Machine is really interesting. You might call it anti-marketing: it looks so strikingly boring and understated on the shelf that you have to know more.

These stories are dark, weird, sci-fi suffused with "DUDE, WEED!" spirituality/philosophy. The last story in particular (The Event Horizon) goes extra hard on this and adds weird sex stuff to the mix. I was surprised to find multiple stories from the mid-70s here with strong cyberpunk elements (Sitting on a Starwood Stool, Programmed Love Story, The Girl Who Was Art). These and the hyper-grimdark Thy Blood Like Milk (don't read if you're a fainter) were the highlights for me.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"My first exposure to Ian Watson’s extensive SF catalog could not have been more impressive. The Very Slow Time Machine (1979) is up there with Robert Sheckley’s Store of Infinity (1960) and J. G. Ballard’s Billenium (1962) as the best overall collection of stories that I have encountered in the history of this site.

The collection is filled with narrative experimentation (“Programmed Loved Story,” “Agoraphobia
[...]"

[Chak · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was so excited when I found this at a bargain bin sale! It had a great cover, had "Time Machine" in the title, and it said on the back that Ian Watson was the British SF Association's Best Writer of the Year!

While I found the book's titular first story to have a great set up, the lack of a real ending was even more disappointing due to its early promise. It was all downhill from there for me, unfortunately. For me, these short stories contained a few interesting ideas, barely fleshed out, never seeming finished, and played out by one-dimensional characters.

Not recommended.

[Shawn]

Reading my "W"s short fiction list, I only read one story here (not in a copy, but in file form off the internet).

In "My Soul Swims In A Goldfish Bowl," a man coughs up a little blob of moving jelly that his wife convinces him is actually his soul - so he puts it in a goldfish bowl and keeps watch over it. A bit of magical realism, perhaps intended as critical of modern, reductive, materialistic approaches to the spiritual?

[Ian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Decidedly unreadable.

[Tell Tale Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

-Gregory Kerkman

[Dodau · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read half of this. The initial story was good but the ones that followed not so much.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting and thought-provoking set of sci-fi short stories! I gave it a 4 though I'd probably normally give it a 3.5 (if that were an option). The writing throughout was very good, a collection of creative prose more often than straight-forward narrative. Each story was unique as well, at least unique within the book, but very often also unique from any other sci-fi idea or story I've ever heard of. Some of this uniqueness was excellent (such as the title story - "The Very Slow Time Machine") and some of it was just plain bizarre and might put off some readers. Still, I love exploring new ideas and this definitely satisfied my desire for that.

This was my principle enjoyment of the book - the unique ideas and areas explored rather than the quality of plot or narrative. A few of the stories had interesting enough plots that it kept me excited (though for some people the style of prose in some of the stories might make it hard for you to enjoy the plot), but most stories were intriguing just to see how the principle idea would be fleshed out. Only a few of these stories didn't really seem to amount to anything much at all, and even then just to see how the idea would be explored kept me interested.

If you're someone who likes exploring unique ideas and who enjoys creative takes on prose, than this would be a great book for you. If you like more straight-forward narrative, good plot, and relatable characters and subject matter, then you would definitely prefer to avoid this book.

[Dajuroka Reads · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ideas in the collection are tremendous and even though written in the late 70s still are relevant. Watson is not telling great stories though but that maybe due to the short story format. I have never been a lover of the short story, particularly as I find it hard not to scan. Many have enjoyed this collection but it would have been nice to have seen a few of the ideas developed over longer arcs. Oh well some ideas to ponder.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is some great science fiction, if you can put it in context (published in 1979). There's something for everyone here, whether you like tantric psychics exploring black holes, post-apocalyptic sun chasers, a world divided by an alien glass dome (sound familiar), human pieces of art, or, of course, a time traveller who is definitely moving slower than you might expect.

[Matt Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of short stories from 1973-1978: sci-fi with sex, race and ideas as strong themes.

It's been a while since I've found a new-to-me sci-fi author that genuinely excited me; this is it.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it just for the title story , which I read and re read 3 times to get my mind round the concept, brilliant .

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

More prose poems than stories with narrative drive. China Mielville does it better.

[AndrewP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthology of stories.

[Savino Longo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tante idee. Peccato che non abbiano tradotto in italiano le altre raccolte di racconti.