THE PERSEIDS

Nine stories, 1995–2000, including three originals, from the author of Darwinia (1998), etc. The tales are related, often through the agency of a peculiar bookshop and its equally eccentric owner, but form no single or continuous narrative. Thus, the aforementioned owner of the aforesaid bookshop teaches a troubled young man four-dimensional chess, thereby opening a doorway into another world—and stealing the young man's youth. In the title piece, mankind gives birth to weird entities that travel out to the stars. Elsewhere, a malevolent godlike being from the end of time delights in psychologically tormenting his present-day victims. A girl being studied by alien Grays (nobody believes her stories) meets the astronomer Edwin Hubble; he helps her understand that the creatures are actually humans from the remote future, drawn by their victims' unconscious ability to evert their perceptions. A new drug allows humans to communicate with insects, and perhaps was invented by insects. A superman-among-us yarn, in Wilson's indirect, minimalist style, becomes a terrifying psychological cameo. “Plato's Mirror” allows its viewers to glimpse the angel within us all—and other things, too. Consciousness, Wilson devastatingly posits, is linked to the other selves that exist in the infinity of possible worlds, so individuals never die, they just get more and more improbable. Finally, rather weakly, a woman gives birth to a strange inorganic life-form.

Beautifully observed, skillfully worked out: stories that flow subtly, almost imperceptibly, from the prosaic to the preternatural.