Books & Poetry

This collection of short stories coincides with a season of talks, screenings and exhibitions to mark the fortieth anniversary of 1968 as an apogee of radical thought and protest. Editor Nicholas Royle’s cute conceit has been to include only contributors who were born in 1968. Their brief: to produce stories with something to say about ‘the nature of revolution or rebellion, about utopias or dystopias, about dreams, change, potential’.

Where the future is concerned, sf writers Tricia Sullivan and Justina Robson prove thrillingly adept at navigating possible and probable outcomes. In Sullivan’s ‘Plan C’, light contains scripts that recalibrate our brains. In ‘1968: A Shortspan Snackfood’, Robson’s narrator researches an essay by swallowing a pill which allows her to commune with simulated characters from the year. In what seems to be a perfected Wikiworld of ‘peaceful anarchy’, human knowledge has been reduced to edible entertainment. Similar territory is explored by Marc Villemain in his elegant, horrifying ‘This Was My Flesh’, set in a cultured, civilised world which just happens to be cannibalistic.

Elsewhere, Rhonda Carrier’s narrator has her romantic concept of Paris challenged in ‘Nine Cubed’, and Christopher Kenworthy’s psychosexual nightmare ‘Young’ dares to make us fear the worst so that our subsequent relief is a kind of bliss. You need humour in a collection like this, and it arrives in the form of James Flint’s ‘Carl’ and Toby Litt’s excellent ‘History!’, which aligns the radical impulse with psychotic breakdown as three young women, armed with their children’s toy guns and radios, hold the village mayor hostage.

Marc Werner’s ‘Someone Take These Dreams Away’ (a self-reflexive meditation on Lindsay Anderson’s film ‘If…’) and Kerry Watson’s ‘The Sorry Years’ (a memoir of her childhood in an Australia blighted by racial intolerance) are effective as far as they go, but have a vague air of will-this-do? about them. It’s a shame, but not enough to spoil this bracing, brain-tingling anthology.