#110. THE CALTRAPS OF TIME By David I Masson

Published : 1968 & 2003
Pages : 204
Overall Mark : 7/10

This collection is David I Masson’s only published book of fiction. Most of the stories here 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. These are only some of the themes tackled with superb scientific speculation by one of British SF’s truly original voices.

DAVID I MASSON (1915-2007)
David Irvine Masson was born in Edinburgh from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. Although his output was small and consisted of short stories, he gained a reputation as a writer of vigorous experimental SF. All of his short science fiction is published in the collection The Caltraps Of Time. He died in Leeds in 2007.

VERDICT
It's not easy to come to an overall conclusion when it comes to a book of short stories. Most of these stories are based on wordplay, as Masson was a huge proponent of languages, and as such some of them can be hard to get into, but the ideas are interesting and work best in short story form as a longer version of these stories could have been pretty tedious.