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INTRODUCTION

It may seem superfluous to subtitle a collection with the description of “ambiguous tales”, since any tale that was not ambiguous would not be worth telling. If ambiguity did not exist, fiction—from the humblest one-liner to the vastest epic—would not exist either, because we would not only be able to content ourselves with actuality but would have no alternative. One can elaborate this issue in high-flown academic terms by citing such classic works of aesthetic analysis as Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, the Inklings’ Bible, but there really is no need; it is perfectly obvious that if double meanings did not exist, we would have to invent them. (Put simply, Barfield’s argument is that there never was a time when they didn’t, so we didn’t.)

There are, however, degrees in ambiguity just as there are in everything else, and there are also different sorts of ambiguity—seven is the most oft-quoted number—ranging from the commonplace and conventional to the abstruse and tortuous, so some tales are more ambiguous than others, and may be ambiguous in more or less commonplace ways. By the same token, there are writers who merely accept ambiguity as a necessity, writers who cultivate it as a staple crop and writers ambitious to become explorers in search of rare and exotic ambiguity. I have always aspired to membership in the last-named category, although I am not entirely confident that my quests have had as much success as I could have hoped. At any rate, in labeling the items in this collection “ambiguous tales” I am aiming for something a little more meaningful than mere tautology, hopeful that the ambiguities they contain might, at the least, be a trifle odd, even within the context of the routine oddities of science fiction and fantasy.

The great but somewhat under-appreciated science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt learned to write pulp fiction by studying the advice manuals of the great but somewhat under-appreciated advice-manual writer John Gallishaw, whose techniques of scenic analysis and strategic planning he used religiously. Like any inventive writer, however, van Vogt added a wrinkle of his own to his theory and method, which he called the theory of “fictional sentences”. According to this theory, different genres of pulp fiction were distinguished not only by the specifics of their content, but also by their typical narrative style.

Having started out writing romances and “true confession” stories, van Vogt was of the opinion that such stories worked best if every substantial sentence they contained featured some reference to emotion, and that the key feature of the “fictional sentences” of the romance genre was that emotional reference. When he switched to science fiction writing, he immediately set out to discover what the key feature of the “fictional sentences” of the sf genre ought to be. He came to the conclusion that it was uncertainty—which is to say that every substantial sentence in a science fiction story should contain a reference that was deliberately underspecified, thus creating a superabundance of ambiguity and generating new dimensions of imaginative space for the temptation of the reader’s curiosity.

The ultimate effect of the assiduous application of this theory, according to some excessively-pedantic readers, was that van Vogt’s work became literally incomprehensible, because it was impossible for the reader to work out what the hell was supposed to be happening, but connoisseurs of rare and exotic ambiguity found the additional wiggle-room both intriguing and exhilarating. I have never been nearly as assiduous in my literary method as A. E. van Vogt, and am quite willing to admit that I have penned the occasional sentence whose meaning is crystal clear, but I have always tried to compensate for that failing as much as is humanly possible by means of a liberal but carefully-applied gloss of sarcasm, which hopefully makes it impossible for readers to figure out whether or not I mean what I am saying. Mostly, admittedly, I don’t—but every now and again I do, and because that possibility, or threat, is always there, so is the edge of potential ambiguity. Not all readers appreciate this as much as I would like them to do, and I suppose that I ought to apologize to the others, but the apology would inevitably be sarcastically ambiguous, so it can be taken as read.

At any rate, no mater how many failed fictional sentences there are in the stories included here, I have tried to ascertain that their perennial keynote is uncertainty. They feature events of dubious significance, seen from unreliable narrative viewpoints. The stories themselves do make some pretence of instructing the reader as to what to think about the extraordinary hypothetical events described therein, but the postures in question are inherently deceptive. Some readers might think this a lazy way to write, in that it lets me off the hook of having to decide what I think about them myself, but I am only human; if I had already made up my mind what to think about things, I probably wouldn’t be a writer at all. I certainly wouldn’t be a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories, never content to deal with conventional views of what is, but insistent instead on dealing with all kinds of bizarre possibilities that never were and never will be, and are intellectually interesting for exactly that reason.

My favorite story in the book is “The Highway Code”, because it is the only one that has a central character with whom I can truly sympathize and admire (alert readers will notice that he is loosely based on one of the great heroes of modern mythology, Thomas the Tank Engine), but I could not call the book The Highway Code lest it cause dire confusion to British learner drivers, so I settled for The Best of Both Worlds instead.

The substance of “The Face of an Angel” was subsequently absorbed into the text of a novel called The Moment of Truth (Borgo Press, 2009), but the transfiguration forced the story to mutate so considerably that the two texts remain quite different in their narrative implications—one of the many fortunate corollaries of calculated ambiguity.

“The Man Who Came Back” was the first story I published under my own name, its only predecessor being a pseudonymous collaboration, and the contrast it provides with the more recent publications will hopefully illustrate the vast artistic strides I have made in the interim, while never sacrificing my steadfast commitment to uncertainty.

“Appearances” was written when one of my ex-students from the M.A. in “Writing for Children” at the University of Winchester went to work for a Mexican publisher editing a line of dark fantasy novellas aimed at a teenage audience; unfortunately, the publisher ran into difficulties (as Mexican publishers are wont to do), so the opportunity for her to translate it into Spanish vanished into the misty maze of unrealized possibilities, like so many other fond and fabulous hopes.

“The Best of Both Worlds” first appeared in Postscripts 15 (Summer 2008). “The Highway Code” first appeared in We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther and published by DAW Books in 2009. “Captain Fagan Died Alone” first appeared in The DAW Science Fiction Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published by DAW in 1976. “The Face of an Angel” first appeared in Leviathan 3, edited by Forrest Aguirre and Jeff Vandermeer, published by the Ministry of Whimsy in 2002. “Vesterhen” first appeared in German translation in Pilger Dürch Raum und Zeit, edited by Peter Wilfert and published by Goldmann in 1982; the first publication of the English version was in the Kongressbok Confuse 91 in 1991. “The Bad Seed” first appeared in Interzone 82 (April 1994). “The Man Who Came Back” first appeared in Impulse 8 (October 1966). “Appearances” appears here for the first time.