Book Review: In Time’s Empire We Are All Slaves by David Gill

 

In Time’s Empire We Are All Slaves by David Gill

133 pages, Paperback
Published November, 2015 by Pravic Books

Before this book was handed to me during the Philip K. Dick Festival I didn’t know that Professor David Gill ever wrote fiction. As he teaches English at San Francisco State I should have assumed he did, I am sorry it took me this long to learn this. David Gill is one of the best and nerdiest Philip K. Dick scholars we got. Three-time guest on our Dickheads Podcast and the man behind the Total Dickhead blog, the last year’s amazing 16-week online course on PKD. The man knows his stuff.

If you couldn’t tell from the title this pint-sized volume is filled with Pink Beam Fiction, inspired by the master. Gill’s collection is short, sometimes, micro-fiction that packs tons of ideas in the short word/page count. The writing is strong, and I thought we needed more work from the Professor, but I also know he has lots of research and music to make.

Consider this passage from the title story… “He saw beneath her faded Rolling Stones T-shirt, visions of earth girded with hundreds of orbiting satellites whizzing by one another at great speed; he saw freeways advance and multiply like veins across the surface of earth; But mostly he saw in the half-light was concrete disappearing beneath a silver hood, driving, early in the morning, sometime in the future, and he knew from the field, the concrete was cold.”

This passage invokes an internal landscape and creates both a solid and surreal atmosphere at the same time. Each of the stories while short has the complete package. Each has a beginning, middle, and end filled with themes, messages, and points of view. As a reader, I am OK with lush language and stories but as a writer, I like to not waste words. I like how much Gill does with very short stories.

In one of my favorite stories called The Adjustment: “He was planning their wedding, picturing their home in the suburbs, naming their children. She was quite stunning, in a shimmery dress with her long brown hair and a regal nose, like on a statue. He was rather plain looking with a receding hairline in a weak chin.

She decided to have another drink with dinner and see where that got her period she found herself wishing he had a more interesting job, slightly nicer clothes, and a bit more hair he was madly in love but had already convinced himself she was out of his league.”

Without giving away the twist, this is a neat little Twilight Zone-ish with a hint of Black Mirror look at technology all in 5 mini-pages.

“... Mike, I'd like you to make this man a bit more attractive to me.”

While not entirely predictable, the way the story expresses a point of view is a great example of how Science Fiction can be used to explore ideas - some as simple as what we find attractive. Another example is from the story The Human Engine. This one is about a T.S. Elliot simulacra and is about as Pink Beam as it gets exploring what it means to exist itself.

 Nate's tone was accusatory, “you shut yourself down?”

“I would think that's within my rights,” the poet replied.

“Even if you were flesh and blood belonging to God and all that, you still wouldn't be within your rights to shut yourself down. It's against the law.”

“How would the prosecution proceed against a corpse? 

“Listen you are not flesh and blood you were constructed in this lab by my team as such you are a possession of this company, the Ingolstadt consortium.”

The stories in this collection get a little longer as they go, it is a small inexpensive book but for the money, it is jammed with radical and well executed stories with a delightful old school feel. Yeah, I say pick it up.