"The Night That All Time Broke Out" (1967)

Brian W. Aldiss's story is almost more interesting for the circumstances of its appearance here. Harlan Ellison's introduction is weirdly restrained and formal and once again he turns part of it over to the story author, which Aldiss uses to brag about how he's managed to make a living as a science fiction writer, a theme that continues in his afterword. It's true that Aldiss was a key figure in the British and American New Wave of science fiction in the '60s and '70s, with Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Ellison himself, and others, and also that he wrote the story on which Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg based the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. But this story has more flaws than good points. In the future, time itself has been found to exist in pockets underground—something like natural gas. As a product it is a utility, consumed like water or electricity routed directly into homes somehow. The effect is to return one to a happier time in the past—a day or two earlier or a month or more depending on the dose, which is carefully rationed. Until, that is, [see title]. Aldiss explains that death does not result from an overdose, but rather the user is hurtled back through the generations, men following the father's line and women the mother's. The story is about what happens when the system breaks down in an accident and too much time floods it. People begin to lose memory and understanding of technology. The main problem distracting me here was the ephemeral make-believe nature of time. Descriptions are never really attempted, which might be wise, but time is flooding everything yet there is no sense of what it is like to be there as it happens. It's all just kooky, and then when people start using Elizabethan and older English that's our clue for the severity. In the end they may have even lost language altogether. However, we already know these effects wear off eventually. How bad can it be? If the planet is now swamped with time, well, yeah, that sounds like a problem. But what does it look like? What does it feel like? Aldiss writes, "As they ran out into the darkness, high above them towered the great invisible plume of the time gusher, still blowing, blowing its doom about the world." It doesn't exactly paint the picture.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison