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Slow Birds: And Other Stories
Eleven stories deal with slow-motion bombs, spatial anomalies, African ghosts, time travelers, post-nuclear worlds, and evolutionary change
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Ian Watson
300 books123 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 12, 2021
Contains three excellent stories, which are strategically placed at the beginning. The remaining bundle are not up to scratch. These are all hampered by an especially "talky" prose, the chief complaint with Watson's work overall. Even these lesser offerings have flourishes of brilliant imagery and ideas.
The best story is the title one. The "Slow Birds" are slow floating objects which teleport in random places and vanish after a short time. Sometimes they explode the surrounding landscape into glass craters. The people live in little villages on the remaining islands of unexploded land. The craters are employed as the grounds for inter-village glider races. One such race is interrupted by a slow bird. A young boy, differentiated from the other hucksters by his curiosity in where the slow birds come from and where they go, grabs onto one and vanishes with it. The story concerns the tireless search of his older brother, who attains a transcendental state and becomes a religious leader.
The scale of the story shifts from days to years to millennia effortlessly. In this space Watson has his cake and eats it too, covering even Stapledon-esque territory without slackening from a clear structure. He is a writer prone to letting his brilliant ideas spill out beyond the bounds of a satisfying narrative. Here the first half contains, at the level of village life, all of the themes which will erupt on a cosmic scale in the second.
Unusually for Watson there is a cool emotional distance from the narrative which becomes slowly filled with an at first muted but ultimately unbearable nostalgia.
The other best story is "The Width of the World." The premise is that the world expands many sizes but appears the same, the effect only observable in the extended distances involved. A twenty minute drive to work becomes three hours, international travel would take years. The protag wonders the world has grown to accommodate imaginary places. This story is another with an emotional punch. Unlike Slow Birds it suddenly retreats from it's tease of cosmic transformation, ending on a unexpected domestic scene.
The third really worthwhile story concerns the brief return of the poet Lucretius for a reality show which resurrects long dead philosophers and scientists. However Lucretius has a totally different paradigm of understanding the natural world which begins to infect the environment around them. Deers and lions emerge from breasts that grow from the soil, snakes recoil from human saliva and there are a variety of unusual meteorological effects springing from Lucretius' unconscious. He is killed by a producer of the show but the weird phenomenon remains. This one is not at all touching but is lush with dream imagery. The transfiguration of the natural world into something obeying the laws of "pre-scientific" thought is achieve with clarity and good humour.
For these stories the collection is worthwhile. The rest are uniformly stiff and draft-like. One, about a future world where women and men evolve into different species, seems a bit fetishistic (and vaguely offensive in its delivery) but shy to go anywhere interesting with the premise. Another oddly misjudged story is one that has a mystical African leopard man "punish" a middle-class British couple. I like the idea of exaggerated animist laws taking hold of physical reality but the blunt racial stereotyping and sexism ruin it.
Overall well worth a read for the excellent first three stories.
The best story is the title one. The "Slow Birds" are slow floating objects which teleport in random places and vanish after a short time. Sometimes they explode the surrounding landscape into glass craters. The people live in little villages on the remaining islands of unexploded land. The craters are employed as the grounds for inter-village glider races. One such race is interrupted by a slow bird. A young boy, differentiated from the other hucksters by his curiosity in where the slow birds come from and where they go, grabs onto one and vanishes with it. The story concerns the tireless search of his older brother, who attains a transcendental state and becomes a religious leader.
The scale of the story shifts from days to years to millennia effortlessly. In this space Watson has his cake and eats it too, covering even Stapledon-esque territory without slackening from a clear structure. He is a writer prone to letting his brilliant ideas spill out beyond the bounds of a satisfying narrative. Here the first half contains, at the level of village life, all of the themes which will erupt on a cosmic scale in the second.
Unusually for Watson there is a cool emotional distance from the narrative which becomes slowly filled with an at first muted but ultimately unbearable nostalgia.
The other best story is "The Width of the World." The premise is that the world expands many sizes but appears the same, the effect only observable in the extended distances involved. A twenty minute drive to work becomes three hours, international travel would take years. The protag wonders the world has grown to accommodate imaginary places. This story is another with an emotional punch. Unlike Slow Birds it suddenly retreats from it's tease of cosmic transformation, ending on a unexpected domestic scene.
The third really worthwhile story concerns the brief return of the poet Lucretius for a reality show which resurrects long dead philosophers and scientists. However Lucretius has a totally different paradigm of understanding the natural world which begins to infect the environment around them. Deers and lions emerge from breasts that grow from the soil, snakes recoil from human saliva and there are a variety of unusual meteorological effects springing from Lucretius' unconscious. He is killed by a producer of the show but the weird phenomenon remains. This one is not at all touching but is lush with dream imagery. The transfiguration of the natural world into something obeying the laws of "pre-scientific" thought is achieve with clarity and good humour.
For these stories the collection is worthwhile. The rest are uniformly stiff and draft-like. One, about a future world where women and men evolve into different species, seems a bit fetishistic (and vaguely offensive in its delivery) but shy to go anywhere interesting with the premise. Another oddly misjudged story is one that has a mystical African leopard man "punish" a middle-class British couple. I like the idea of exaggerated animist laws taking hold of physical reality but the blunt racial stereotyping and sexism ruin it.
Overall well worth a read for the excellent first three stories.
March 15, 2022
The title story is fantastic and well worth exploring in its own right; one of several fascinating SF works analyzed in the book of critical essays Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. That book analyzes this story better than I can, but essentially "Slow Birds" contemplates the rupture of reality by an alterity whose nature and purpose is beyond the comprehension of this world's inhabitants, and the strange ripple effects evolving technologies can spark. People in a medieval era alternate reality encounter the regular, sudden appearance of slow moving missiles, which just as easily slip out of reality, or randomly explode, steadily enveloping the world in glass craters. Its mood is the eeriness latent in implied intent, the aftereffects of actions which must have some cause but which cannot be understood or guessed at. Understandably some subscribe the slow birds to the mysteries of God, but most don't think about them at all. This story candidly depicts the way the human mind is prone to simply edit out the impossible as data that cannot be processed, or stubbornly shove conceptual outliers within prior metanarratives.
There are some interesting stories besides the title one as well. The book spans subgenres from weird fiction (Slow Birds) to magical realism (White Socks) to surrealism (Universe on the Turn) to even extro-science fiction (Ghost Lecturer). Watson probes the distinct pockets of SF to find inspiration. Besides the title story I most enjoyed Mistress of Cold, Universe on the Turn, the Mystic Marriage of Salome, the Bloomsday Revolution, and White Socks.
Of these, for me White Socks was both the best written and most ambiguous. It takes place in a made up African country and is racist in more than its depiction of events and the characters' thoughts. (Spoiler: the only black main character turns into an leopard, and gives a white character an imagined African version of the trope of the 'gypsy curse,' which serves to otherize him as the appendage of a white centered morality tale—and so moves from person to animal to symbol). Beside that major transgression are a few minor ones of phrasing which travel the well worn grooves of stereotype. But where one draws the line between the author's limitations and a faithful depiction of characters depends on inclination, presuming the reader takes stock in such distinctions. "Every journey, no matter how slight or modest, was a 'safari'." The man turned leopard, otherized though he is, voices an incisive condemnation of the imperialism that is the unconscious background of the white married couple who center the story. And the depiction of these characters is both undisguised and unadorned, the reader is not spoon-fed when to react and how, thus shocking details are casually laid out like scenery, making for a more compelling read. The greasy film of disgust coating everything is faithfully commensurate with who these people really are. Finally, as a short story, White Socks is superbly paced and structured, with compelling and vivid characterization as aforementioned.
There are some interesting stories besides the title one as well. The book spans subgenres from weird fiction (Slow Birds) to magical realism (White Socks) to surrealism (Universe on the Turn) to even extro-science fiction (Ghost Lecturer). Watson probes the distinct pockets of SF to find inspiration. Besides the title story I most enjoyed Mistress of Cold, Universe on the Turn, the Mystic Marriage of Salome, the Bloomsday Revolution, and White Socks.
Of these, for me White Socks was both the best written and most ambiguous. It takes place in a made up African country and is racist in more than its depiction of events and the characters' thoughts. (Spoiler: the only black main character turns into an leopard, and gives a white character an imagined African version of the trope of the 'gypsy curse,' which serves to otherize him as the appendage of a white centered morality tale—and so moves from person to animal to symbol). Beside that major transgression are a few minor ones of phrasing which travel the well worn grooves of stereotype. But where one draws the line between the author's limitations and a faithful depiction of characters depends on inclination, presuming the reader takes stock in such distinctions. "Every journey, no matter how slight or modest, was a 'safari'." The man turned leopard, otherized though he is, voices an incisive condemnation of the imperialism that is the unconscious background of the white married couple who center the story. And the depiction of these characters is both undisguised and unadorned, the reader is not spoon-fed when to react and how, thus shocking details are casually laid out like scenery, making for a more compelling read. The greasy film of disgust coating everything is faithfully commensurate with who these people really are. Finally, as a short story, White Socks is superbly paced and structured, with compelling and vivid characterization as aforementioned.
September 1, 2022
The weakest collection of Watson's short stories I've so far read.
August 14, 2022
could not finish this. i remembered liking 'slow birds' when i read it last year and wondered why i stopped reading the rest of the collection. i came back to it again yesterday, to the story 'white socks' and immediately realised why. incredibly racist premise and execution. it is strange how many white men think reiterating anti-black and racist beliefs is radical simply because the characters are unlikeable. crude and superficial examination of racism.
could not get past the lone indian man in the story being reminiscent of the victorian 'indian mutiny' hysteria over 'rapist savages' being a latent threat to white women. turned my stomach.
could not get past the lone indian man in the story being reminiscent of the victorian 'indian mutiny' hysteria over 'rapist savages' being a latent threat to white women. turned my stomach.
June 6, 2020
Very strange book. A lot of Cold War paranoia and very strange takes on sex and gender.
August 8, 2023
Just first story, very good
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August 25, 2010EX-LIB. 1ST EDITION COLLECTION OF STORIES.
November 4, 2016
Cool, cerebral, mixed.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews