The Caltraps of Time is David I. Masson's only published book of fiction, a collection of short stories, most of which made their first appearance in New Worlds SF during the 1960s under the legendary editorship of Michael Moorcock. An apocalyptic battle at the edge of the unknown, the deadly fascination of voracious magma, a world where the weather expresses itself as mood.Theses are only some of the themes tackled with superb scientific speculation by David I. Masson.
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
192
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The Caltraps of Time is a collection of short stories, the only book of fiction published by David I. Masson. He never wrote a novel, and every story that he published in his lifetime is in this volume. If for no other reason this is therefore a unique book. However, few writers with only one book to their name have ever come up with such startling and original material.
David Masson’s first story, the remarkable ‘Traveller’s Rest’, appeared in the September 1965 edition of New Worlds, which at the time was the leading SF magazine in the UK. The story of New Worlds and the development of the ‘New Wave’ has been told many times, but within that context Masson’s work was always in a class of its own. Many of the New Wave stories of that period were experiments with form, or with narrative structures, or with subject-matter. Not all these experiments succeeded. Masson was entirely different: he was involved with language itself, in particular with what he called the functions and effects of phonetic sound-patterning. He brought this fascination with language to the science fiction genre, and the results are all here.
In 1965, ‘Traveller’s Rest’ made a profound impact. Its completely original ideas about the mutability of language and meaning had a seminal influence on the small but extremely active group of writers, critics and readers who closely followed New Worlds. I was one of them – if I look back and remember my first encounter with this story, I am reminded of the imaginative vistas it opened up for me as a beginning writer: the apocalyptic war being fought across a time-dilated landscape, the feeling that time itself can influence human perception, and that experience of life is, like mass and energy, subject to the distortions of relativity. Nearly half a century later the story still has an extraordinary effect. It feels like a breakthrough, a pioneering work that has influenced many others, but it manages to retain its own lovely mystique.
Within a few months, Masson followed up with a series of similarly original stories, all different in tone and subject matter: some satires, a brilliant pastiche of 17th-century English, other explorations of the human psyche in extreme circumstances. All his stories create a spell: in particular a sense of strangeness, of otherness, in counterpoint to the banality of the ordinary. ‘Mouth of Hell’ describes the discovery of a huge hole in the world, one which must be explored at any cost. The difficulties are fantastic, and one team of explorers after another comes to grief. But in the end the hole gives up its secrets. What then happens is pure Masson.
Others are superficially less serious: ‘ Not So Certain’ is a conversation piece about the difficulties human beings might have when they try to learn the language of an alien race, and in the midst of the expostulations and gleeful discoveries there are many serious arguments about language and phonetics. And in one or two of the stories (‘Doctor Fausta’ or ‘The Transfinite Choice’) the dazzling sequence of puns, allusions and neologisms will make you think you might have somehow backed inadvertently into the world of Masson’s contemporary, John Sladek.
The first seven Masson stories were published in 1968, under the present title, in a beautiful and highly collectible hardcover edition by Faber and Faber. A paperback followed a few years later, but both editions have been long out of print.
By the early 1970s, Masson’s burst of creativity had come to an end. He published no more stories after ‘Doctor Fausta’, in 1974.
David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh in 1915, to a family of distinguished academics and thinkers. He went to Merton College, Oxford, between 1934 and 1938, where he read English Language and Literature. After graduation he went to work as an assistant librarian at the University of Leeds. The second world war interrupted: he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Mediterranean theatre, chiefly North Africa and Italy. After the war he became the curator of special collections at the University of Liverpool, but in 1956 he returned to Leeds to become curator of the Brotherton Collection.
Between 1951 and 1991 he published many articles on phonetic sound-patterning in poetry (especially in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke). His published works include three articles with the Princeton University Press publication Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965). Also notable is his paper, Poetic Sound-Patterning Reconsidered (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, May 1976).
In 2002, my colleague David Langford and I decided the time had come for a complete collection of Masson’s stories. We knew that he had written three more stories after the Faber book, and these were little known. David Masson was then in his late 80s, and almost ridiculously happy to be remembered (little realizing, perhaps, how well he was remembered, and not just by Langford and myself). He enthusiastically collaborated with us on minor revisions and improvements to the Faber stories, and entered into a detailed correspondence with both of us about the less well known extra three. He actively involved himself not just with the quality of the text (which presented amazing demands to anyone who was not David Masson himself, a man proud to proclaim himself obsessed with a level of intricate detail that was above all pedantry) but also with the correct sequence in which the stories should be presented in the book. He wrote a short Foreword for our edition. The new collection was published in the USA as a print-on-demand book, which was unfortunately not widely distributed.
It is therefore not only a great pleasure to bring this book to the Masterworks series, but a genuine privilege to have been able to work with David Masson. He was a good and great man, and his sole book of fiction is a good and great work. More than that: it is memorably different and inspiring.
Christopher Priest
The snake still lurks in the grass, the abductor in the Enna meadows, the caltrap thrust in the field of time, the trapdoor to Hell. True, some can make a life anywhere.
‘Eat up your bacon now, May,’ said Miriel. ‘Daddy’s ready to run you up – don’t keep him waiting.’ May, humming irrepressibly to herself, picked up her fork and began toying with the crisp fragments. ‘May!’ said Miriel sharply again. The ten-year-old’s brown curls tossed, but she fell to. Philip, his dark eyes scanning the faces of his mother and sister with the air of an anxious dog, spooned in his porridge. He was only in his third year. Roydon, shifting about a little in his chair, was hidden behind the paper, uneasily aware of its sour biscuity odour in the sun. ‘STRIKE DUE TO LAST BITTER SPELL?’ read one of the headlines, ‘LATE RAGE-STORMS STALL OHIO’ said another. Roydon frowned, inserted a tiny earphone into one ear and switched on the minitape recorder which he had set to the last forecast.
‘A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north,’ it said. ‘Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals. By midweek the griefs will be dying out, rather sooner in the south. Drives weak to moderate, veering creative to instinctive. Temperament chillier than normal for the rest of the week, but serene; however, some early-morning fear in the latter half of the week is expected to form in low-lying areas, dispersing slowly each day.’
Roydon snapped off the recorder and removed his earplug. ‘Better give May a slow pep-pill before she goes. The forecast’s a bit gloomy; I shouldn’t be surprised if there were griefs on and off this afternoon, too.’
‘O.K. Here you are, May; swallow that with your tea,’ said Miriel. ‘And you might as well have one yourself, darling. I can give Phil a quick quarter-dose if he goes out to play.’
‘Oh need I, Mummy?’ from May. ‘The school’s O.K., and they always pass the stuff round at break.’
‘Yes, May – I think Miss Weatherbridge is a bit careless about these things; she has a lot of other things to think about, after all.’
‘Oh, all right!’
Roydon dumped a singing May from his little city-car, the green one. The pep-pill was already lifting his spirits, protected as they were by the car-aerosol. He had to check himself from chanting rowdily and dodging about in the workwards traffic. ‘I should have waited till lunchtime and had a quick one,’ he thought. ‘Miriel coddles me – and I take it from her.’ The vision of her brown oval face old-fashionedly curtained in the straight fall of soft dark hair hovered between him and the traffic for an instant. After eleven years it was still a mystery and an enchantment to him. He opened the draught and let the sadness seep in for a little. A few of the schoolchildren waiting to cross at the next school were in tears. ‘Feckless parents,’ he thought. They would be all right after a minute in the air-conditioned school.
In the studio office all was bustle and confusion. Panset, the chief, was in and out constantly, mood-weather bothered him comparatively little, except that in periods of unusually warm temperament he usually had to take a tranquilliser outside. The pep aerosols were functioning nicely all over the building. The night’s programme of current affairs was beginning to take shape, but must rest in a half-cooked state till late that afternoon, when Roydon would leave it in the hands and mouths of the studio people. He rang up Miriel at lunchtime to say he might be later than usual, the way things were running.
‘Are you coming out for lunch, Vic?’ he called to his mate across the table, fixing him unconsciously with a characteristically searching gaze under his thick brows; ‘I’m getting sick of the canteen stuff.’
‘Better pep yourself up again, then, Royo, there’s a nasty grief outside,’ said Ken Mattock, coming in, breathing deeply and erratically through pinched nostrils.
‘Oh, the corner place will do us. That’s not far, we’ll survive it, eh, Vic?’
‘I’ll take a quick booster first if you don’t mind. I’m a bit low this morning,’ said Vic, helping himself from his pharmapouch. ‘Right – that’ll fix me, I’m ready now.’
That night, a rather disturbed May eventually persuaded to bed, Miriel broached the subject of school precautions again. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t care for the way they hand out their peps and tranqs – much too rough and ready. I delivered May after lunch in the red city-car: she was quite upset coming in. I had a word with the head. I’m going to keep her carefully drugged up and the school will have her for lunch in future. That means she won’t be so easily exposed.’
‘You coddle her too much,’ said Roydon.
‘No, Roy, I can’t have her education going to pieces because of all these ups and downs. It may be all right for some parents, but not for us. We have her future to think of.’
Roydon gave way. He sighed for the Golden Ages of his parents’ memory, when the world’s atmosphere had nothing worse than true weather and a little fallout for men to contend with. A feature item on the chaos in Africa and India, scarcely mitigated by pharmacological aid, underlined his thoughts. The Indians and Africans were trying to ride out griefs by hectic dance-sessions on the lines of the old Mediterranean tarantella-remedy, and angers and fears by great choral chants, but these folk-remedies were naturally very chancy. Only the most advanced nations had been able to meet the new emotional influences in the air with air-conditioning and with drugs subtle enough to act quick enough or slow enough and without seriously affecting judgement or the body’s reactions. His own ‘World-Day’ programme came through and he watched it dutifully and critically. It was followed by a Men-of-Science interview with a microdiathesiologist.
‘You see,’ explained the pundit, ‘the mood-climate differs not only from country to country, but from place to place, from street to roof, from valley to slope, and often in quite spectacular ways. Take the corner of a high building or the top of a cliff. This sort of site is subject to great turbulence. While the general mood-weather round it may be gloomy one day or one hour and optimistic the next, the mood at the acron, as we call it, is often switching minute by minute from despair to ecstasy and back again. Hence the semi-mystical nature-loving joy one moment and the suicide-leap the next.’
‘But such violent changes are not met with in other places, are they?’
‘Not commonly. Indeed the micro-sentiment at many spots is more stable than that of the general mood-weather at man-height. The surface of marshes is nearly always depressed and fearful. That of a park or a well-kept garden are warm, friendly, serene. And of course there is a third class of microdiathesis which varies on a 24-hour cycle. A wood or a lake at noon is usually gay and serene, at midnight amorous in moonlight but hostile and intensely fearful in darkness. The nature of the cycle in this case depends on the illumination.’
Roydon, yawning ostentatiously, switched the set off at this point. Details of this sort were rather beyond him, his yawn implied. But his heartbeat was accelerating. Programmes like this one he found disquieting. The world was dangerous enough without these local effects. He preferred not to know. The shelter of Miriel’s arms and hair blotted out the world and its perils.
Three years later it happened. Roydon, now in the studio team of World-Day, and normally working from 3 to 11 p.m., was rung at the studio one March afternoon at 5.
‘I thought I told you not to ring me at night – it’s far too hectic here!’
‘Roy, Roy, it’s Phil! He –. . .
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