Soft dystopias

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating the present. In a new collection of short stories by the veteran sf author M. John Harrison, lurid visions of aliens and spaceships play second fiddle to melancholic snapshots of plodding suburbia. Many of the tales in You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press, £9.99) are set in leafy south-west London, amid the banality of modest affluence: from Putney to Chiswick, Twickenham and St Margarets, and along ‘the endless heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea’.

In ‘Cicisbeo’, a husband ensconces himself in his loft, and will only communicate with his wife via notes. ‘You found people like Tim all over London,’ the narrator explains. ‘They had rowed a little at school. At the weekend they wore chinos and a good quality sailing fleece… They never seemed to age: instead, their self-deprecation matured into puzzlement.’ In ‘Animals’, Susan rents a seaside cottage from an elderly couple and imagines the dullness of their conversations: ‘Do you remember… the year we planted the daffodils and nothing came up? What a laugh we had over that!’ ‘Psychoarcheology’ riffs on the discovery of Richard III’s remains to send up the culture industry. The relics of dead kings are ‘a geological resource… each containing enough energy to power a couple of careers, a biography, an MA course, a BBC4 series’.

Harrison hails from a family of engineers, which may well account for the prevalence of construction and home improvement scenarios in these pages. They include asides on chemical grout and the deployment, by one particularly enterprising builder, of goat’s dandruff as filler between buttresses. His novels have been likened to J.G. Ballard’s, but these stories are more like satirical set pieces than brooding psycho-fictions: genial and generous, finding wry mirth in absurdity.