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The Review

Man In His Time

by Brian W. Aldiss

Man In His Time

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Man In His Time is one of those Aldiss collections that exists slightly in the shadow of the Best SF Stories anthology, and it should not. The title novella, about a man returning from Mars who is now living a few minutes ahead of everyone around him, is one of the cleanest and saddest things Aldiss ever wrote.

The other stories are the usual Aldiss mix: alien-contact pieces that go somewhere unexpected, a couple of straight literary stories with no SF element at all, an experiment or two that does not entirely work. None of them feel like filler.

Four stars for the title story alone, which I think about more than almost anything else in Aldiss's short fiction. The rest is solid 60s and 70s SF written by someone who took the form seriously as literature.

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