If you haven't yet discovered the writings of John M. Ford, you could hardly find a better place to start than From the End of the Twentieth Century. If you're a long-time fan of the writings of John M. Ford, you could hardly find a better book to add to your shelves. This collection of Ford's short writings (published by NESFA Press and, by their grace and good planning, still in print five years after its release) is dizzying in its diversity, exhilarating in its wit. Indeed, these qualities make it something of a reviewer's nightmare, because the collection transcends both simple summary and standard praise.

Praising the collection for its diversity is a case in point. Short-story collections are often lauded for this quality, so to give this book its due, the reviewer has to explain that this is not a short-story collection, but a collection of writings that includes essays, poetry, a role-playing game scenario, and short fiction. Ford is an intensely exciting and surprising writer partly because of this paradox: he is both intensely aware of genre and utterly disrespectful of its social strictures.

There's a lot of talk about genre in speculative fiction circles, but its class implications are seldom discussed, even as the class boundaries it maintains are carefully policed. The speculative fiction mainstream -- hard working, technocratic, aesthetically unpretentious -- looks with envious scorn on the silver-spoon elegance of highbrow literature. An exuberant fandom drives out the squeamish literati. The speculative fiction elites -- serious-minded, status-conscious -- look with distaste upon the media that pander to their imaginatively-challenged readers: Star Trek and Star Wars series fiction, role-playing games. And so the stratified social order of the literary world is kept stable, each group knowing its place and proudly defending it against encroachments from above or below.

Enter John M. Ford, author of the acclaimed alternate history The Dragon Waiting and the much-loved, riotously funny Star Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet?, and the strata become helplessly scrambled.

Readers of From the End of the Twentieth Century will find "The Lost Dialogue," a weighty poem in blank verse exploring the workings of history by contemplating the cataclysmic eruption of Thera, which wrecked Minoan civilization. They will also find "Roadshow: An Adventure for Traveller," a piece which sketches the scenario for a comic adventure in which the player-characters are hired as roadies and concert security for an interstellar rock band. Both are pitched perfectly for their genre; neither is self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek, or contemptuous of its generic status. Not that Ford isn't capable of tuning his style to tongue-in-cheek parody. See how he takes a playful poke at the overblown high-fantasy style in his essay on genre, "Rules of Engagement":

"Meddling fool! You have borne processed cheese upon the High Altar of Moo! All the plans of Holstein the Black-Spotted are in this come to naught!"

When confronted with Ford's supremely flexible and good-natured artistry, what's a self-respecting reader to do but sit back, stop worrying for a while about what the neighbors think, and enjoy it?

A second source of Ford's artistry, which also follows from his remarkable handling of genre, is his lack of concern with establishing an "original" vision. Instead, he mixes old and new, strange and familiar, in his own unique way. Many of his stories are overtly based on materials drawn from myth and history, but never are these materials simply recycled. "Waiting for the Morning Bird," for example, tells the story of the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia from the point of view of the author, who is watching the launch countdown on TV in the company of four SF archetypes: the Ace, the Professor, the glamorous Countess, and the tyrannical Baron. As the history and the myths of space travel meet to discuss its future, Ford deftly shows us how we understand both the present and the future in terms drawn from stories of the past.

But Ford is no archetypal traditionalist. "Riding the Hammer" tells the story of the first railroad in magical Liavek (the shared-world setting of Ford's story-collection Casting Fortune) and the rationalist engineer named Copper who seeks to free himself and the railroad from subjugation to the old ways and the ritual sacrifices they demand.

If Ford's explorations of the interplay between myth and history will engage the reader interested in Big Ideas, the human drama of his stories will not disappoint the reader who is primarily interested in plot and character. Ford's fantastic settings and historical problems exist for the sake of the characters, not for their own sake. For this reason, there's not any "hard" SF in the collection (except for a delightful hard SF essay on Lunar trains, which explains the design of the transit system in his young-adult SF novel, Growing Up Weightless), even though there's plenty of rigorous science of pre-modern, modern, and futuristic varieties throughout the collection. Ford's characters confront worlds bigger than they are mysterious and dangerous, strange and wonderful. How will they deal with these worlds? How will they survive in them? Ford does not offer his readers the reassuring completeness of infodumps or authorial blueprints; his readers must struggle together with the characters to understand the world.

Ford's "Alternities Corporation" stories are perhaps the most unsettling in this regard. Ford has written four stories dealing with this mysterious corporation, two of which are reprinted in From the End of the Twentieth Century. A vacation-business empire, Alternities made its fortune by twisting time and space to create pocket-universes tailored to fulfill the wildest vacation fantasies of their clients. Now, however, the system has broken down, and vacationers and workers scattered across space and time must struggle to find a way home, or even to survive, in a universe whose structure seems both unfathomable and out-of-whack. In "Intersections," an Alternities worker who leads vacationers in simulated WWII fighter-plane raids lands in a world different from the one from which he took off, one that uncannily resembles the past Alternities was simulating. In "Mandalay," (the oldest of the stories in the collection), a motley band of Alternities castaways tries to find their way home by marching through the endless interdimensional tubes that linked together the Alternities worlds. In both stories, the wild science of temporal manipulation works as a perfectly plausible backdrop for the psychological strain faced by the characters.

Yet, to appreciate fully what Ford is doing, one must note that, however plausible the background setting, the story-development in both depends on what, viewed rationally, must appear to be astonishing coincidences. Those trekking down the endless hallway through time and dimensions, hoping to find home, open a door to another world just at the moment a man who (it turns out) has information they want is being hanged by the angry residents of that world, and they are able to rescue him in the nick of time. The psychological stress created for the WWII pilot, and the people whose world he enters, comes from the closeness of the match between vacation fantasy and historical reality. If the match were any more exact, it would be undetectable. If it were any less, the mismatch would be obvious. Fine coincidences, both. If this sort of thing bothers you, it's your loss. Ford knows that the good storyteller must gather together the elements the story needs, and if they are to be gathered together with drama, to sparkle against one another with wit or even with wisdom, probability may need to be quietly throttled backstage while the audience is distracted.

Occasionally Ford will miss the mark a little. The Shakespeare parodies in "A Little Scene to Monarchize" and "The Bard in Prime Time" have their moments (Richard III singing "The Usurper's Life Is Not a Happy One" to the tune of "The Policeman's Lot" from The Pirates of Penzance is definitely one of them) but are not consistently funny. "Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail" (the one story original to the collection) is an uneven blend of the hard-boiled style of Hammett's Continental Op stories (it's even set in the San Francisco of the 1930s) and the Orpheus myth. It's a stylistic warm-up, perhaps, for Ford's latest novel, The Last Hot Time, which likewise uses the style and setting of Depression-era gangster fiction, except that it's not actually set in the past. Instead, Ford creates a near-future urban fantasy set in a Chicago changed by the return of the lords of Faerie to mortal Earth. In the lawless and partly ruined city, the old gangster style is revived. Night-club singers, black-and-white films, gun battles. But the contemporary touch is there in motorcycle gangs and the intimations of punk, leather style, which are adopted, strangely, more by the elves than the humans.

If From the End of the Twentieth Century offers a comprehensive introduction to Ford's varied styles and interests, The Last Hot Time gives readers who know Ford an opportunity to appreciate his work on a more expansive canvas. Like his short stories, The Last Hot Time is character-centered. It tells the story of Danny Holman, who comes from the Iowa farm-country to the city, where magic and science mingle. The reader isn't sure what drives Danny, and he's not sure either. He finds himself brought into the entourage of a Mr. Patrise, who owns a club, and who has mysterious sources of wealth and power. How much of his business is illegal, how much of his business is magical, no one knows for sure. Trained as a paramedic, Danny enters Patrise's service as a doctor, and receives his alias (few in Patrise's service go by their given names) -- Doc Hallownight. One might say that the book is about the transformation of Danny Holman into Doc Hallow. One might also say that the book is a love-story for the city of Chicago. But neither would be quite accurate. Since the reader knows no more than Danny does, and he begins the story not knowing his city, his employer, or himself, it's only retrospectively that the reader will begin to understand the plot of The Last Hot Time.

The feeling that the world is both mysterious and out-of-whack, conveyed in short form in the Alternities stories, is here sustained across two hundred pages. That may not appeal to readers who want the larger time investment that a novel asks for to be repaid with definite answers. But readers who enjoy character-centered fiction or stories that ride high on style will find much to repay their investment. Though Ford doesn't manage a smooth blend of styles in "Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail," he's pretty close to perfect in The Last Hot Time, right down to the song-lyrics:

Tell me what my true love loves
'Cause I want to fit him
Like my hands in gloves
Will he get in motion
For a carol of devotion
Or a cooing like a soft gray dove's

The blend of sophistication and subtle sensuality, ready to be backed by a piano accompanist or a big band, would do Cole Porter proud.

So take the pleasures of the novel as you go. The night-club performances. A visit to the Field Museum of Natural History with an elf. Buster Keaton films shown on magically powered projectors. A hot date at the Art Institute. Highly-charged, edgy sensuality (Danny's discovery of himself is a sexual as well as professional coming-of-age). It would be a shame to miss a word of it.

Or of From the End of the Twentieth Century. In this review I've only been able to touch so far upon a few of the excellences of the collection. In addition to everything I've already mentioned, there are other gems that I would be remiss not to include. There's "Amy at the Bottom of the Stairs," a haunting time-travel story. There's "As Above, So Below" -- a fantastic dialogue with a dragon. The idea for the dragon might have been lifted from John Gardner's Grendel (though where Gardner lifted him from I'm not sure), but the story's feel for character within the strange imagined situation, the sense of timing in the movement of the plot, are inimitably Ford's own. They are the tell-tale signs of Ford's artistry, in whatever genre he plays. There's "Walkaway Clause," a space-opera love story based on a Child ballad. There's the SF-and-the-blues story, "1952 Monon Freightyard Blues," which is rightly the first story in the collection. It taught me more about how to read Ford than any other piece. When a hobo story-teller quotes Shakespeare and T. H. White to an alien, you can see Ford splitting our social and generic hierarchies along their lines of fracture to produce the gem of the story.

And the last mentioned, but surely not the least in the collection, is the unclassifiable and justly famous "Scrabble with God," in which the world changes to fit the exigencies of God's Scrabble rack. Zweeghbs and skazlorls, created and uncreated before your very eyes! It's a good thing for us that the game switches to Monopoly before things get too much out of hand.

In "Scrabble With God," Ford handles the destructive unpredictability of history with a light and comic touch. But this weightier theme runs through his works. His awareness of change guides his own stylistic changeability, never allowing his readers to become too comfortable or complacent in their exploration of his fictive worlds, or if they are heedful of his fictions, their own:

Time is a construction of layers:
Ash and iridium, the rings of trees,
The stone that was a trilobite in mud,
A sphere of light from an exploded star.

History is the draping of the layers
Into a Time that makes some human sense:
Troy is a hill built on seven cities,
The flies in amber are taxonomized.

The past is the interleave of Time and History,
A garment woven for the muse to dance in;
Now modestly drawn close, now flashing us a view
Of something secret that inflames the sense.

Ford's opening to "The Lost Dialogue" might guide us through more than just the poem itself.

Christopher Cobb is Senior Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons