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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Four thought provoking and occasionally moving stories, 11 May 2002
By A Customer
The book consists of four short stories, "The Nightingale Sings At Night", "Great Work Of Time, "In Blue" and the title story, “Novelty”. A unifying theme behind them all could be said to be the very metaphysical one of "time, chance and change".The opening story, “The Nightingale Sings at Night”, is my personal favourite: a deceptively simple disguised take on an ancient (Biblical) fable bringing a new lustre to an old allegory and making its often overlooked but deeply profound central idea stand out as fresh and vivid again. This story could also have been called "how change came into the world" so it is a fitting prologue for the other reflections based on the topic. "Great Work of Time" is an intriguing piece of science fiction grappling with the paradoxes of time travel via the get out clause of “orthogonal logic”. As a previous reviewer has said, this has something in common with John Brunner or perhaps I could add Barrington Bailey (in “The Fall Of Chronopolis”) in its ambition to come up with an imaginative attack on the very difficult (maybe impossible!) conundrum of how you can have time travel and not have everywhen ending up confused with everywhen else. I enjoy stories of this kind and admired the attempt but the central conceit didn’t quite work for me in the end and I couldn’t swallow the paradoxes that couldn’t be thrown away, so unlike the previous reviewer I thought it was the weakest in the collection. “In Blue” is an account of a kind of nervous (or is it metaphysical?) breakdown – scary and moving in parts. The narrator lives in a post Revolutionary world governed by “act-field” theory. I was reminded of Issac Asimov’s psychohistory but “act-field” theory is a clever updated version for a post Chaos Theory savvy audience. The story is a subtle meditation on history and inevitability and how the individual can be oppressed by a system of thought even (or especially) when they most believe it. There’s an ambiguous kind of redemption at the end. The final story (Novelty) is, I suspect, a wistful hymn for a book that the author would like to have written but which never made it to the page. As someone who has occasionally attempted to write my own stories I can sympathise with the view that all the best ideas are the ones that never get done and nothing comes out in the perfect form in which it once seemed to exist in your head! “There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars” as the narrator relates in the story, and this story is itself a long talk in a bar about a story that isn’t written. I was reminded of “Perfect Vaccuum” by Stanislaw Lem which is a series of imaginary reviews about non existent books which are more fascinating from the outlines alone than they ever could be if they really existed. That certainly doesn’t apply to the review you’re reading now though! Get hold of this book and see what you think.
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