An Infinite Summer
First US edition
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| Author | Christopher Priest |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Anita Siegal |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Slipstream |
| Publisher |
Faber and Faber (UK) Charles Scribner's Sons (US) |
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Publication date
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June 1979 (UK) Oct 1979 (US) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 5957731 |
An Infinite Summer is the second collection of short stories by Christopher Priest and the first of his books to collect stories set in the Dream Archipelago. The stories had all previously been published in various anthologies and magazines; they may be described, somewhat interchangeably, as science fiction, fantasy literature, metafiction and macabre.
The material in the collection may be divided into two types: the first, namely "An Infinite Summer" and "Palely Loitering" are more straightforward works of science fiction involving time travel, while the other three are early parts of Priest's "Dream Archipelago" sequence, described by John Clute as "intensify[ing] the sense that Priest's landscapes had now become forms of expression of the psyche, and are of intense interest for the dream-like convolutions of psychic terrain so displayed." Priest would later revisit the setting at length in novels such as The Affirmation and, in 1999, these early stories would be revised and reassembled with other material as The Dream Archipelago.
"An Infinite Summer" was originally published in the anthology Andromeda 1 (1976, ed. Peter Weston, ). A time travel story, it was reprinted in later anthologies, such as Trips in Time (1977, ed. Robert Silverberg, ), and in translation. It was selected for The Best Science Fiction of the Year 6 by editor Terry Carr. Priest says that he interrupted the writing of his 1976 novel The Space Machine ("somewhere in Chapter 13, to be precise"), and chose to publish the story separately "because there was one strong feeling that would not fit in the novel: the sense that layers of time exist, that places do not change so much as people."
In August, 1940, protagonist Thomas Lloyd daily visits the Thames Bridge in Richmond, London, England. He spots "freezers" around the park; freezers is his term for people from an unknown future who, for unknown reasons, will occasionally use a device to freeze people out of time. These frozen people remain visible only to the freezers and to others, like Thomas, who were once frozen. In June, 1903, Thomas was frozen at the very moment of proposing to a lovely young lady, Sarah, who accepted him. Thomas remained frozen in this tableau until 1935, after which he finds that the frozen are considered, by their contemporaries, to have vanished. He is now disinherited and poor; he learns that freezing may "erode" after minutes or years; and he finds what work he can in the vicinity so that he may visit Sarah, in her radiant immobility, every day. "Thomas Lloyd, of neither the past nor the present, saw himself as a product of both, and as a victim of the future." After long, patient waiting, he sees Sarah unfreeze during The Blitz. The freezers have watched Thomas; when Sarah awakes, blissful but baffled by the bombing, they restore their tableau, presumably so that the lovers will wake again in a kinder future. If so, this is one of Priest's happier endings.
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