Voices of Time

If you liked the Atrocity Exhibition, then the title story of this collection should be right up your street.

Powers, a surgeon, is building a mandala in the desert, having a condition that will eventually put him into a coma. Each day, he sleeps more until eventually he will not wake up. The universe is dying and entropy is approaching. A man, operated upon so that he never sleeps is stalking powers, leaving him notes each day detailing how long the universe has left...

The Voices of Time also features the story 'The Sound Sweep', which not only inspired Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles, but also contains a device that gave its name to electronic music group Sonovac.

As an aside, I got a previous version of this collection out of the library as a thirteen year old. It a yellowing hardback, called the Four Dimensional Nightmare (it features a couple of Vermillion Sands stories that aren't in Voices of Time). Under the polythene wrapped around it, the cover was a pen and ink drawing of an empty swimming pool. I read it in the concrete and brown wood of Newcastle Central Library, say next the boulders set into the floor as an art piece.

I spent years trying to track the story down afterwards, remembering the blank desert with a few towers and sheds here and there, the hot sun and the man, hefting bags of cement, inescapably running out of time...

Cheers,

Mark