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Andrew Sean Greer, Brian Aldiss, David Hume, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gordon Eklund, H.G. Wells, Jay Lake, Lewis Carroll, Malcolm Ross, Martin Amis, Philip K. Dick, Soren Kierkegaard, T.H. White
This example from my Cognitive Mapping columns was written and first published in 1999, in Vector 207, September-October 1999, to be exact. At the time I was writing about a rarely used science fictional device (as I say in the column, it is an easy and comic thing to do in film but not so easy, and certainly not so comic, in fiction); but since then it seems to have become somewhat more common. There was, for instance, the film of Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Benjamin Button’ (a story I had missed), there was a rather fine novel by Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, that came out in 2004, and I remember coming across the device, or something like it, in a story by Jay Lake. So maybe there is something about the device that speaks more to the 21st century than it does to the 20th? Continue reading
