2004 Early light came over Worley Copse from the sun of a russet autumn that only the mid-nineteenth century could produce. A young man about to feed his father’s pigs came to an abrupt halt as the rays of morning gave piercing flashes of silver and gold reflecting off something strange by the edge of …
2002 He looked upon these mechanisms as others looked upon dinosaur bones and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a similar sense, he could draw patterns of complex evolution from them. These were to him primordial seams in base rock, compressed forests which could be decoded into lives and days and embryo thoughts of mankind’s thoughts. …
1998 A bespectacled young girl of slight figure, who looked exactly like the long-haired young Coleridge from Peter Vandyke’s portrait, rode on a rickety bicycle by a long, rutted concrete wharf, where tired Polish freighters unloaded a brown Silesian coal whose protozoic edges could take off a finger in seconds. Streaked through with hairlines of …
2000 The gas-main repair crew taking a tea break in Bradley Road, W11 didn’t spare much notice for Ethel Bratby as she shuffled along the broken pavement with her heavy bags. Most of the workmen were too intent on the young girls sunning themselves in the beleaguered park over the road, between the new private …
2002 for Jacques Vallee. My name is Jacob. I am a man on a park bench reading a book. As far as the great canvas of life is concerned, at fifty-five I am a smudge. A smudge is one of those patches on the edges of great paintings that on closer inspection perhaps generations later …
1999 Brenda Harris, trainee psychiatrist at H.M. Prison Drakebury, almost groaned as she read the report on Prisoner 60149837. A first interview with a fallen computer-programmer from Shepherd’s Bush was the kind of thing only a black Monday-morning like the one outside her window could offer. She read through the brief report again and, though …