WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME

HYPERION CANTOS author Dan Simmons wows readers with a collection of 5 novellas

By Chris Wyatt     December 16, 2002

Readers most closely identify Dan Simmons with his rightfully popular epic SF novel HYPERION and the other three books in the HYPERION CANTOS series that followed. But Simmons has written in many other genres, including mystery and horror...and he's even (gasp) written in the mainstream. Simmons' latest collection WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME, now more widely available in trade paperback from HarperCollins/Eos, concentrates on stories of speculative fiction. Yet each story separately reflects the large diversity of interests and knowledge bases that the author has built during the course of his life.

The opening story in the collection, "Looking for Kelly Dahl" is an interesting, if uneven, tale about a suicidal man who, at the moment of his death, is somehow transported into an alternative world by a former student named Kelly. Once in Kelly's power, the teacher is provoked into a deadly game of hide-and-go-seek. Kelly somehow constantly shifts the environments of her world, so that each day might be a different geological period (today is the Triassic, tomorrow might be the Jurassic, etc...).

The story has some fun, RED DAWN-style survival adventure, and it also employs interesting settings. But the motivation behind Kelly's actions remains unclear, despite an attempt at explanation. Kelly seems to be acting out trauma from parental sexual abuse, which is a strong, though perhaps overused, character motivation...but how does all the time jumping and alternative reality stuff relate? And how does the resolution of the game heal her? The story winds up muddy and unclear, but there is a certain resonance to the ending that makes it worth the read.

Next in the collection is "Orphans of the Helix", a return to the world of the HYPERION CANTOS, which won the Locus reader's poll for best novelette. The story, the foundation of which was originally conceived as a pitch to the producers of STAR TREK: VOYAGER is a fascinating read. The story depicts a civilization menaced by a giant locust-shaped starship that literally eats everything in its path.

"The Ninth of Av" and "On K2 with Kanakarede" highlight the diversity in Simmons writing. "Ninth" was a story solicited by Robert Silverberg for inclusion in a collection of stories all set in the year 3001. Simmons explains in the introduction that he had trouble conceiving of what a world 1,000 years from now will be like...but that he decided with "nauseating certainty" that, even if everything else changed, "someone, somewhere would be trying to kill the Jews." Although, in this reviewer's mind at least, that seems less than a certainty, the thought did inspire a dark, heavy and wonderful ponderous on the nature of religious hatred.

Conversely "Kanakarede" is a wilderness adventure about a team of humans who are trying to make the climb up a treacherous mountain face with an alien in tow. The story finds an enjoyable way of informing us that it isn't advanced science that brings different races together, but rather the experience of working together for a mutual goal. Think of this story as the equivalent of an inter-species management training obstacle course.

The collection ends with an unusual selection. "The End of Gravity" isn't a short story, but a film treatment. The treatment is still in development with a Russian filmmaker, and though it is has interesting subject matter (the future of the Russian film program, and the question of whether humans are really ready to move beyond the Earth) it suffers from the jumpy, cramped style one would expect from an undeveloped movie treatment.

The author's thorough introductions to each story absolutely accentuate the reading. Simmons loves to digress, talking about everything from the local Forth of July water-balloon fight to a list of the movies he thinks were better as films. But even Simmons' digressions show interesting sides of the writer.

Despite some uneven stories that may not interest all readers, WORLDS ENOUGH AND TIME can be recommended, if only for the endearing writing style of one of SF's strongest practitioners.

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