Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations
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Alison stuck by Steve loyally thereafter—even though he didn’t always duck, when prettier women than her recklessly threw themselves at him, and his own looks eventually faded into mediocrity— and she fulfilled her ambition of bearing all his children.
Eventually, long after Rhodri Jenkins had retired, and some little while after he had given up playing cricket—without ever getting a hat trick or scoring a century—Steve was promoted to deputy head. By the time he wrote his one and only book, Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations, the events it described seemed to belong to a distant and confused past, when he had been quite a different person.
Even though he never quite made it to the top of his profession, or over the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Steve was satisfied that his was a happy ending to a rewarding life-story.
The human species did not become extinct in the early twenty-second century, perhaps due to the subversion of the logic of its situation by the retrospective intervention of the hyperbaryonic intelligences in the flux of the time-stream, and perhaps not. The species did, however, become extinct eventually, as was inevitable.
The consequences of humankind’s slightly-protracted lifespan were not entirely insignificant, but they were barely noticeable to most of their intelligent successors; that particular element of the Great Unfinished Transfiguration made little or no difference to the metahistory of time travel or the ultimate formulation of the Cosmic Collective Unconscious.
No final version of the time-stream was ever concluded by any kind of Ultimate Consensus; in that context, there could be no such thing as a happy ending—but the everlasting uncertainty was, in its own exotic fashion, glorious.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, and The Stones of Camelot. Collections of his short stories include Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution, Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, and Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical entries to reference books, including both editions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and several editions of the library guide, Anatomy of Wonder. He has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including several by the feuilletonist Paul Feval and various classics of French scientific romance.
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